• Explain and understand the different meanings of sustainable development, corporate sustainability, sustainable intra- and entrepreneurship in the context of a sustainable business model project.
• Operationalize a definition of sustainable entrepreneurship in an applied research project. Differentiate between sustainable enterprise and sustainable innovation mode and argue for selecting one mode as the basis for your group’s project.
• Use systematic research design, logical research design and triangulation in your sustainable business model research project.
• Conduct extensive field research for your sustainable business model using interviews, participant observation, and archival research. Understand the different benefits and drawbacks of interviewing, participant observation, and archival research for problem definition including tools such as empathy mapping or POV Statements.
• Describe the factors driving group work behavior and its performance outcomes in sustainable entrepreneurship and apply these to your group’s project experiences.
• Contrast the hybrid strategies used to identify sustainable business opportunities and formulate a strategy for how your group generates complementarities.
• Discuss different forms of impact investing and argue which are most appropriate for your sustainable business model.
• Contrast different ways in which your sustainable business model can be scaled up or replicated and determine the most appropriate choice.
• Evaluate the applicability of sustainable impact assessment tools and evaluate how their use affects the performance of your sustainable business model.
• Reflect on the successes and failures in your own project work and suggest ways to improve on failures and build on success in future basic and applied research projects concerning sustainability.

Sustainable entrepreneurship describes the discovery and exploitation of opportunities to create business models which address humanity’s social and environmental challenges. Sustainable entrepreneurship generates disequilibria in market and non-market environments, by finding ways of turning environmental and societal problems into complementary assets. The course will develop capabilities in sustainable opportunity identification as well as sustainable enterprise modeling. At this point in history, particularly due to anthropogenic climate change, there is broad consensus that humans in aggregate need to use fewer resources, consume less, and set humanity on a sustainable relationship with the earth. Generally, when we ponder these sorts of changes to human existence, we think in terms of sustainability. 

Sustainable entrepreneurship will give you the opportunity to both define sustainability and design a business model for an organization or a startup to implement your idea of sustainability. 

The course Sustainable Entrepreneurship will be divided into three sections. In the first section, students will learn basic research design and design thinking as it relates to sustainability and then craft independent research projects which result in a robust and rigorous problem definition. In the middle section of the course, students will undertake group independent research on the topic of their choosing in order to develop a business model addressing the issue selected. In the final section of the course, students will analyze their research data and then design and present their sustainability solution. 

Sustainable entrepreneurship will be highly interactive and assignment based. Students will have the opportunity to try out and workshop everything they learn in the class. Most of the course's time will be spent in this sort of applied learning. Given that, attendance, diligent coursework, and participation are all essential parts of learning in Sustainable Entrepreneurship. 

The course is taught and examined in English. 

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Dyllick, Thomas, and Kai Hockerts. "Beyond the business case for corporate sustainability." Business strategy and the environment 11.2 (2002): 130-141.

Vedula, et al. 2022. "Entrepreneurship for the public good: a review, critique, and path forward for social and environmental entrepreneurship research." Academy of Management Annals 16(1): 391-425.

Hockerts, Kai, and Rolf Wüstenhagen. "Greening Goliaths versus emerging Davids—Theorizing about the role of incumbents and new entrants in sustainable entrepreneurship." Journal of business venturing 25.5 (2010): 481-492.

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Kannampuzha, Merie, and Kai Hockerts. 2019. "Organizational social entrepreneurship: scale development and validation.” Social Enterprise Journal, Vol 15(3): 290-319.  

Choi, Nia, and Satyajit Majumdar. 2014. "Social entrepreneurship as an essentially contested concept: Opening a new avenue for systematic future research." Journal of Business Venturing 29(3): 363-376.