Keywords

1 Start with the Why

Scholarly studies show how entrepreneurial education has become more and more relevant in higher education around the globe (Bauman & Lucy, 2021; Ratten & Usmanij, 2021; Albornoz Pardo, 2013). Entrepreneurship is increasingly considered a university’s third mission and there is a tendency toward universities becoming entrepreneurial themselves, i.e., entrepreneurial universities (Forliano et al., 2021; Compagnucci & Spigarelli, 2020). Moreover, the goal of educating students on entrepreneurial thinking, including entrepreneurial skills, e.g., critical thinking and creative thinking, instead of focusing on how to write a business plan has become reality in more university classrooms (Peschl et. al., 2021; Neck & Greene, 2011). Still, when taking the grand societal challenges seriously it is necessary to take entrepreneurial education to a new level. To be able to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (UN, 2015), we need to encourage students to become societal change agents. Students need to understand the current and future grand societal challenges of our time and to think outside the box in order to be able to contribute to solving them (Bohlayer et al., in review). It is essential to provide students with tools and methods that ignite their entrepreneurial thinking. Teaching the knowledge and enhancing the skills about how to start a business cannot any longer be the only goal of entrepreneurial education. Students need to recognize the possibilities that open up with entrepreneurial thinking to transform the world as change agents, not only as entrepreneurs but in any other occupation they work in the future.

With this in mind, we developed the concept of the seminar called: Transformational Sustainability Entrepreneurship (TSE).

The seminar’s goals are:

  • To develop an understanding of a form of entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship that contributes to solving the grand societal challenges.

  • To create (business) ideas that align with this kind of understanding.

  • To recognize that this form of entrepreneurial thinking is not limited to creating businesses.

The authors of this chapter have conducted the TSE Seminar eight times at two different German universities during the last three years. In this chapter, we introduce the seminar concept itself and our experiences and learnings so far. We want to encourage explicitly you, as the reader, to use this concept, and where necessary, to adapt it to your specific needs.

We start with a brief explanation of the setting where and in which way the seminars have taken place. This is relevant for the reader’s adaptation of the seminar. Followed by the seminar’s structural setup, which is divided into three main phases: understanding, creative thinking, and pitching, as well as the overarching reflection process. In the next section of this chapter, we present our five fundamental elements for implementation of the TSE seminar. Finally, we present a list of our learnings and takeaways based on the student’s reflections and feedback.

2 The Setting

Thus far, we have conducted the TSE Seminar at two different German universities: Hamburg University and Leuphana University Lüneburg. The first two seminars took place at Leuphana University with Master’s students from different disciplines and it took place in English. Five times we offered the seminar at Hamburg University, both at Bachelor (in German) and Master levels (in German or English). The seminar is currently being conducted at these two universities.

One observation from our experience so far is that when the seminar is in English, it opens the opportunity for international students to take part. This international perspective and the interdisciplinarity in the seminars with students from different fields of studies are a great added value for the discussions in class and the student’s actual learning On the other hand, when the German students participate in their mother tongue, they have the possibility to dig deeper into the discussion. For a comparative table of all seminars, see Table 1.

Table 1 Comparative table of TSE Seminars taken place between Winter Semester 2018/2019 and Winter Semester 2021/2022
Full size table

3 TSE Seminar’s Structural Setup

As can be seen in Fig. 1 the seminar is structured into three phases and an overarching reflection process:

  • Understanding: Students are to read scholarly articles about different concepts of entrepreneurship, exchange with peers and understand the phenomenon of a form of entrepreneurship that aims at contributing to solving the grand societal challenges through transformative action.

  • Creative Thinking: Students start daring to think differently from their usual paths of thinking, explore their passion and creativity, cooperate, consciously learn from each other, and go jointly through trial and error while creating their entrepreneurial ideas.

  • Pitching: Students learn to professionally and creatively pitch their ideas and finally take part in a pitching event with real-life entrepreneurs as the judge giving them feedback.

  • Reflection: The students are motivated to embark into a self-reflection process about their learning process during and after the seminar.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Seminar structure and examination tools throughout the semester

Full size image

3.1 Phase 1: Understanding

The first phase starts with students reading diverging academic articles on understandings of different kinds of entrepreneurship (e.g., social entrepreneurship, sustainable entrepreneurship, and transformational entrepreneurship). This theoretical approach is complemented by students researching enterprises they personally consider to be examples of transformational sustainability entrepreneurship. With their particular knowledge from the article they read in mind, students first discuss these texts with a group of students who read the same articles (between four to six people). The goal is to agree on the text’s key points to convey to the other students of the entire seminar group. Thereupon, students discuss the understanding of entrepreneurship within groups consisting of one “representative” of each article read. Hence, students experience different conceptual views. By discussing in groups they become aware of the phenomenon’s complexity and its different research realms, for example, social, sustainable, sustainability, and transformational entrepreneurship.

With this knowledge in mind, they meet a real-life entrepreneur who is considered to help to solve societal challenges with his/her entrepreneurial endeavor. Students get in-depth insights into the practical perspective outside the conceptual world.

The final open discourse about what TSE may encompass is taking place within the entire seminar group. The final goal is to come to a consensus on an understanding of “transformational sustainability entrepreneurship.” Within this discourse session, we as seminar instructors facilitate the discussion about the relevance of different aspects that characterize TSE. This consensus is illustrated in a flower shape. The flower’s petals show the main characteristics the students decide will be their understanding of TSE. Each characteristic was discussed lengthily to make sure the group had the same concept in mind. Worth noting is that within all seminars, the discourse on these characteristics showed similarities, e.g., in considering different dimensions of sustainability, but also differences, e.g., in their consensus about profit making. Thus, the flowers of the different courses are not looking the same in the integrated characteristics (see Fig. 2). This shows how diverging perspectives of different people that are coming to a consensus form different understandings.

Fig. 2
figure 2

TSE flower examples from two different seminars

Full size image

This approach is of high value to students’ learning process as they realize that there is no one “right” definition of TSE, rather it is each seminar group that defines its individual understanding of TSE, depending on the background knowledge they bring in and the knowledge they have built throughout this phase.

3.2 Phase 2: Creative Thinking

The creative thinking phase is based on Design Thinking (DT), particularly the stages: (1) understanding the problem and empathizing, (2) ideation, and (3) rapid prototyping. Furthermore, iteration is also a vital aspect of DT which we highlight and apply during class. Through the different stages of the process, we use diverse tools and methods.

Students are asked to think about a societal challenge they have personally been confronted with and would like to solve. At this point, we emphasize the importance of student’s personal connection to the problem. In the session, each student briefly introduces the challenge they want to work with and we build small groups of 3–5 students based on the similarities of the proposed challenge or if someone felt inspired to work on a particular topic.

We encourage the teams to do thorough research about the selected challenge they will be working on during the seminar. The goal is to avoid the “Heropreneurship” pitfall (Daniela Papi-Thornton, 2016). This is when the entrepreneur develops an “ideal” solution from their own point of view without actually knowing well about the situation of the people affected by the problem and thus lacking an accurate understanding of the challenge. Papi-Thorton considers that aiming at being a hero and getting social acknowledgment of their peer group, but not being a real system changer is when entrepreneurs fall into the pit. By not considering the surroundings and not having an understanding of what the problem is about, the entrepreneurial solution could end up not helping the people affected by the problem to solve, or even worse, having a negative effect. The participants independently develop entrepreneurial-transformational ideas and elaborate on them creatively. In order to do so, we as the facilitators guide the students through a creative thinking process.

In the first stage of understanding the problem and empathizing, we introduce different tools: the impact gaps canvas, semi-structured interviews with the people who are concerned with the challenge approached by the students and/or experts, the classic DT tool “persona” and a stakeholder analysis. Through this process realistic entrepreneurial ideas come to life.

Since most of the mentioned tools might be well-known, we would like to briefly introduce the impact gaps canvas. It was designed by Daniela Papi-Thornton (n.d.) during her time at the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship. The impact gaps canvas reminds students that to get to know their topic in depth, part of their research needs to include not only the problem itself and its characteristics but also the solutions already at hand and when possible the failed solutions too. It is about finding the gap between the problem’s characteristics and the actions implemented so far to solve it. This gap is where they work to find creative solutions also with the goal of changing the system when necessary. Second, there is the ideation stage, in which we use different creative methods, for example, association (pictures, objects, words), different forms of brainstorming (brainwriting, crazy 8s), and mind mapping, to mention a few. We also integrate our surroundings, for example, with a session at a museum. During this period, many students are surprised when they realize how randomly writing words could develop into real solutions for their challenges.

Third, through rapid prototyping, which is characteristic of DT, the students can determine differences among the team members’ perspectives and develop solutions. The prototype is also used to get feedback outside the seminar room. Students prepare 3–5 questions about their prototype and go talk to people in the street or digitally via video call. Some students could feel challenged by going outside the classroom or by calling people to talk about their ideas. However, once they do, they agree on the feedback’s high value and how it helps the group move forward.

Thus, with fast prototyping, students quickly become aware of mistakes and easily adapt their ideas. It is not very common to have a seminar in which the educators say, “it is fine to make mistakes and fail with your ideas.” However, this understanding is essential in entrepreneurial thinking. Not to wait until perfection, go out and talk to people, get their feedback, and be open to change and improve. Our guest entrepreneurs also talk about this perspective. To have the possibility of not being afraid to fail is a meaningful learning experience in general, but especially in this creative stage.  

3.3 Phase 3: Pitching

In the third phase, the students have pitch training in which they learn about the different types of pitches, storytelling, and some do’s and don’ts. The first two seminars included a pitch training as a voluntary extra session embedded in an one-day excursion to Berlin, in which external pitch experts conducted the training with the students. With the relevance of the training and the difficulties to travel in the years 2020 and 2021, the pitch training is now included as a fixed part of the seminar’s program. Afterward, the students have the opportunity to present their ideas in a pitch competition with a judge consisting of representatives of the entrepreneurship community. An added motivator to follow-up with their idea(s) is a jury award for a three-month membership at the Impact Hub Hamburg. However, not all of the seminars included this award as seen in Fig. 1. Still, all pitching sessions include the opportunity of meeting and learning from entrepreneurs in an open conversation.

3.4 Reflection and Final Session

The theory of Mezirow’s transformative learning describes how individuals transform their perspectives based on critical reflection of taken-for-granted assumptions (Mezirow, 2009). Transformative learning processes initiate the required change in perspectives and behaviors for tackling today’s challenges. Cope (2003) suggests that learning outcomes are the result of an “inward” critical self-reflection, in which reflective processes are triggered by specific events, e.g., entrepreneurial failure. Pittaway and Thorpe (2012) refine this point of view and clarify that for effective learning, action must be followed by a high-level reflection. Transformative learning is consequently less about the content of learning, but instead more about how the individual critically reflects throughout the learning process itself.

Based on this knowledge, we provide different opportunities for the students to critically reflect on their learning process during all seminar phases. In all seminars, we recommend to write a reflection log after each session. At the end, the students are asked to do the following task as part of the final assignment:

Please include into your written assignment a reflection of your personal learning process throughout the seminar and while writing the assignment. Please don’t evaluate the seminar (i.e. what you liked or disliked), but rather which contents or discussions were new for you, what you have been thinking about for a longer time or more often, or what you are still thinking about. What was difficult and/or easy for you to understand and how you felt about it.

The written reflections allow participants to report behaviors and feelings in their own words and encourage in detail reflection of individual learning experiences. The use of written reflections in educational settings is well known for understanding the learning experience from a student’s perspective (Friesner & Hart, 2005; Sadler-Smith & Shefy, 2007; Steen-Utheim & Hopfenbeck, 2019) as well as personal developmental processes (Niemi, 1997) and changes in learner’s perceptions (Lau, 2017).

The last session is a reflection session during which the students share their learnings and have space and time for constructive criticism. As seminar developers and educators, we consider this session vital for the seminar’s further development. We also conducted discussion groups in three of the seminars, in order to further expand on the learning experience of the students, As parts of the learning take place within student interactions, we aim at creating a research setting that additionally allowed us to focus on those group dynamics. The premise behind this was that a confrontation with a contrary point of view to the familiar one triggers a transformative learning process, which—with the opportunity to participate in a sincere discourse—includes iterative reflection of one’s own and others’ points of view.

4 The Five Fundamental Elements for Implementation of TSE Seminar

In the following section, we present five fundamental elements for successfully implementing the Transformational Sustainability Entrepreneurship seminar. A course that aims at real learning impact for students and toward entrepreneurial thinking that can potentially contribute to solving the grand societal challenges of our time and transform our society toward sustainable development.

The entire seminar design had the students’ learning process in focus. Thus, it was planned from a learning rather than from a teaching perspective. We designed the seminar to initiate transformative learning within the students, according to Mezirow (2009, 1997). With this intention in mind, we integrated three central interventions that were supposed to trigger disorienting dilemmas to encourage transformative learning. The examination tools are also heading toward the learning of the students. Furthermore, we try out new pedagogical ideas. For instance, in the second seminar, we arranged two sessions outside the university classroom. One session took place in a local museum, another at a climbing gym. From this follows that we see ourselves as educators rather than teachers.

Moreover, we understand the seminar concept development as an iterative process, in which the concept is constantly evolving. Therefore, within each of the seminars we enable a space for constructive feedback from the students with, for example, discussion groups, questionnaires, and individual written reflections. Based on this information, and after a personal reflection process of the educators’ team, we continuously review the concept and, if necessary, adapt it accordingly. In the following, we present the five elements that we have carved out as being fundamental in the last three years to make this seminar being a successful and inspiring learning journey for students. We welcome other educators to use this concept, adapt it to their realities, and grow with it.

4.1 Be Educators

It is necessary to consider the seminar’s goal and become clear about the type of course instructor we are or want to be. Our understanding of ourselves in that role is crucial to creating a viable and meaningful learning environment. According to Greenberg et al. (2007), there are too few opportunities for management and entrepreneurship instructors to reflect upon their teaching practice and, in particular, their role as course instructors. Although the article was published more than a decade ago, we still observe the same dilemma. In the literature, we, as management and entrepreneurship scholars and instructors, can find numerous articles describing and discussing different teaching settings. However, the role and the philosophical self-understanding of the instructors are falling short. For that reason, we continuously give ourselves space for reflection and will share these with you at this point in a condensed form:

  1. (A)

    For us, the term “educator” (instead of, e.g., teacher or lecturer) as used by Mezirow (2009) is key. Thus, we refer to two primary sources in our self-understanding as educators. First, we follow Jack Mezirow’s specification of the role of the educators. He argues that their role is to:

    1. 1.

      Assist learners to bring the transformative learning process into awareness.

    2. 2.

      Help them improve their ability and inclination to engage in transformative processes.

      He believes it is not the educator’s role to somehow predefine a particular decision or norm for action. Mezirow underlines that “Transformative learning focuses on creating the foundation in insight and understanding essential for learning how to take effective social action in a democracy” (2009: 96).

  2. (B)

    Second, we refer to the inspiring research paper from the colleagues Greenberg et al. (2007) in which they introduce three teaching professors’ archetypes (see Table 2):

    1. 1.

      The Athena: Classic lecturer, hierarchical thinking, transfer knowledge from expert to novice.

    2. 2.

      The Prometheus: Educator/facilitator, whole-person approach, considers ethical and philosophical aspects.

    3. 3.

      The Asclepius: Emotional coach, hierarchical thinking, like a parent helps students become emotionally centered.

Table 2 Instructors’ interpretive frames of their roles (based on Greenberg et al., 2007: 450)
Full size table

We understand ourselves as facilitators, educators, and at times as role models. We follow an egalitarian relationship with the students and see ourselves as co-learners and guides. Although the Greenberg, Clair, and MacLean emphasize that all three archetypes are inherently interlinked, our self-understanding shows the most cross-over with the Prometheus archetype. Moreover, we expand the understanding of educators not only in the role of the professors but include also in other kinds of teaching staff at universities. Our entrepreneurial education’s philosophical background is characterized by the belief that students need to develop as human beings. Their mindsets need to be strong in interpersonal, ethical, global, and interconnection aspects. Thus, we aim at facilitating students in the development of interpersonal, emotional, ethical, and systems thinking competencies (Bohlayer et al., in review; Ploum et al., 2018; Wiek et al., 2011), in order to not only support them in becoming “good” future entrepreneurs but also “good” global citizens.

As societal demand for education is continuously increasing, it is necessary to question how far entrepreneurship education for TSE requires us, as educators, to transform “for what we teach, how we teach, and how we relate to students” (Greenberg et al., 2007: 439). Recent studies in educational settings have started to move beyond a “teacher perception” (Birdman et al., 2020; Brandt et al., 2021; Konrad et al., 2021). As we position our seminar as an innovative entrepreneurial educational endeavor, our role perception is pivotal to implementing our educational setting. This holds particularly true as the consequences of the grand societal challenges exceed the solutions yet found and implemented. We as educators require different or additional perspectives and alternate tools compared to our standard ways of educating, particularly in business studies (Akrivou & Bradbury-Huang, 2015; Ferraro et al., 2015; Tracey & Phillips, 2007). It is now for more than a decade, scholars have been criticizing current management and business education. They argue for a shift in the paradigms of education. The reason is that paradigms that form the educators’ worldviews and the applied education methods have an impact on students’ subsequent business behavior (Ghoshal, 2005; Giacalone & Thompson, 2006; Lawrence et al., 2012; Marshall et al., 2010; Starik et al., 2010).

Still today, students are often experiencing the Athenian teacher archetype. This type represents the traditional lecturer role. She/he focuses on teaching students models and theories of the specific discipline while aiming at the cognitive development of students’ language and concepts. Typical is a rather hierarchical relationship with the students, in which the instructor is the expert and the student the novice in the field. With this kind of understanding, students experience definitions determined by certain books and articles that the instructor assigns to be the “right” ones to refer to. These pre-definitions by the instructor may hinder the students’ interpersonal and ethical mindset development (Greenberg et al., 2007).

Hence, we would like to encourage our colleagues to reflect on their role and clearly see ourselves as educators that follow a Prometheus’ role view.

4.2 Create a Learning Setting That Is Always Open for Different Perspectives, Discourse, and Individual Value Reflection

There are many different understandings of entrepreneurship that consider more than profit-making and scaling up of entrepreneurial endeavors. Still, students tend to expect the instructor to determine which one will be the understanding in literature the seminar group will be referring to.

In our seminar, we approach the process of understanding the phenomena differently as explained in Sect. 3.1. Unlike in other seminars or lectures, the readings and open discourse among peers and with real-world entrepreneurs do not end by announcing one precise, correct definition. On the contrary, and in line with the transformative learning process, the goal is that students engage in an open discourse with clashing conceptual understandings within the group. Then they reflect on their view compared to others’ perspectives. In a first step, this may result in students feeling “irritated” (student quote, LMA27), “confused” (student quote, HBA54), or “frustrated” (student quote, HMI61). After some time and reflection, they usually realize that they are learning through this kind of open discourse.

I was a bit confused as I noticed that there were no precise definitions on the subject. This made me feel a bit unsafe, as there were no demarcations like in other seminars or other topics. After that, however, I found that it changed the way I think. For me personally, it was like discovering a new world. In the same breath, I realized that I had a limited perspective beforehand. (HBA54)

In line with this notion and building upon our experience as course developers and educators, we propose a learning setting where students are encouraged to think outside the “wrong and right” paradigm. The grand societal challenges are highly complex problems with norms and values of various stakeholders conflicting with each other (Blok et al., 2016). Therefore, we insist that it is essential to continuously question the legitimacy of teaching specific mind habits or points of view regarding, for example, sustainability. Thus, we emphasize the role of (higher) education in supporting individual value reflection without teaching particular points of view, as sustainability- and transformation-oriented they might be. Inner transformations, defined by Wamsler (2020: 112), are “changes related to people’s mindsets, which are made up of their values, beliefs, worldviews and associated cognitive/emotional capacities.” These are considered essential leverage points for societal change (Ives et al., 2020; Woiwode et al., 2021). However, this kind of transformation can only be accomplished when learners have a safe and open space to get into deeper learning processes (Frank & Stanszus, 2019). Learners need support to dare to think differently from their usual points of view and shape the entrepreneurial world with their ideas. We argue it is (higher) education’s task to support learners in developing their values for shaping the world entrepreneurially. This way, they can contribute to solving today’s grand societal challenges.

4.3 Facilitate Open, Transparent, Authentic, and Eye-to-Eye Level Conversations with Different Real-Life Entrepreneurs

Real-life entrepreneurs are the best inspiration and encouragement in the students’ learning process. We invite entrepreneurs who are already implementing transformational sustainability thinking and entrepreneurial action in their everyday practice to speak in class. The goal is to make students familiar with this kind of entrepreneur, who share their vision of contributing to sustainable development of society by entrepreneurially approaching grand societal challenges.

At three time points different entrepreneurs introduce their entrepreneurial endeavors, mission, vision, and individual entrepreneurial story (see Fig. 2). The points in time have been chosen purposefully: The first encounter with an entrepreneur takes place after students have read, reflected, and discussed in groups about the entrepreneurship literature and examples. The second is the session in which they learn how to pitch their ideas. The third encounter is during the pitch event itself, during which 3–4 jury members are real-world entrepreneurs who briefly introduce themselves and their biographical journey. Meeting these entrepreneurs at those time points enables the students to compare their conceptual understanding and learning how to pitch in the real world.

Something that is special within this field of teaching is that all of the guest entrepreneurs communicate authentically and at eye level with the students and share sincerely and transparently their experiences as well as their struggles as entrepreneurs. With these unconventional conversations, seminar participants challenge their assumptions about what it means to become and be an entrepreneur. They start to reflect on and form new perspectives about taking entrepreneurial actions. Before meeting with the real-world entrepreneurs, our research shows that most of the students thought of entrepreneurs as exceptional individuals who are very capable of implementing their ideas (Bohlayer et al., in review). When meeting the entrepreneurs personally, students realized that “founding is nothing that only ‘super crazy people’ can do” (student quote from our study on the seminar, LMA08). They see that they are human beings with similar concerns like them.

Hence, students of the TSE seminar, start questioning their belief that they cannot develop entrepreneurial ideas that are “good enough to start an enterprise” (student quote, LMA21). The study of Bohlayer et al. (in review) shows that the TSE course participants realize that starting something and being creative without making a plan in advance felt like a barrier. However, as they hear from the entrepreneurs that becoming an entrepreneur is not following a clear line, a new perspective opens in front of their eyes. Contrary to a perfectionist planning process, students realize that entrepreneurs can work according to the credo “learning by doing” (student quote, LMB34). Thus, by talking to real-world entrepreneurs, students understand that entrepreneurship is about taking action on a problem, and strategically planning for the perfect idea may even hamper it. Ironically enough, strategic approaches also in connection to entrepreneurial action have been part of their management studies and thus hindered them from daring themselves to think creatively and entrepreneurially:

I learned, (…) that the founding process is not always straightforward. . . . I must honestly admit at this point that this is not an approach that was brought to us during my management studies. That’s why I think it’s all the better that you’ve heard such statements from entrepreneurs who founded their company in exactly this way. (student quote, LAM11)

The very open and transparent live reports of real-world entrepreneurs help students realize that entrepreneurship is inherently about taking action and that entrepreneurial (strategic) preparations are connected to getting involved in responsible actions.

4.4 Use Creative Thinking Methods

“I am not a creative person” is a common statement among university students when introducing the creative thinking phase. Afterward, they realize that this is not the case.

Another important outcome from that experience is that I have more faith in myself now, and I believe that I can be creative and artistic as well! (LMB35).

We confirm every time in the seminars that everyone is creative, it is just a matter of the methodological approach to creativity, as explained in Sect. 3.2. Moreover, the students learn that the creative thinking process begins before they start coming up with ideas. Creativity starts when they begin to understand the problem, i.e., the challenge they want to solve in the TSE course. Without this essential step of understanding and researching the challenge, the rest of the creative process will be limited by previous knowledge.

Students who start the seminar with a set idea in mind learn that they should “not be married to their ideas.” Because when taking TSE seriously, first, it is about getting deeply familiar with the societal challenge and finding valuable solutions. Second, in this process, it is about developing ideas. After acquiring more profound knowledge about the problem and working with their peers in open discourse, students learn to bring in different perspectives and start with the problem instead of focusing on the solution. In some cases, even a completely new topic area replaces the previous one. Part of getting familiar with the problem is to talk to the people who are concerned with it. By learning more about people’s stories, their concerns and emotions about the problem, and in some cases, solutions, students gain expertise in the topic they are working on. Finally, students can fill in the persona, describe one or more concerned persons, and profit from a new solution to the problem.

4.5 Combine Different Examination Tools: Pitch, Learning Diaries, and Reflection

A common aspect in all the times the seminar took place are some of the evaluation elements. Even though the requirements might differ depending on the university, faculty, or study program, we keep two components because of the learning effect for both students and us, as educators.

First, the students’ pitches in a real-life scenario, with three to four actual entrepreneurs as the judges, served as one evaluation instrument. The pitch event has a multi-perspective learning effect. The pitch in itself, the preparation, telling a story, and being precise to keep time are tools that are valuable for students for their further career, be it as, for example, entrepreneur or manager. The practical feedback of the jury of entrepreneurs gives them awareness about the real challenges their ideas might encounter and get them to answer questions in real time. Furthermore, there is the learning from the peers, since all get to see the development of that initial challenge into a possible solution and see an outcome of the creative thinking process. Finally, based on the seminar input, students receive theoretical and methodical feedback from us as the educator(s). We suggest the pitch counts for 40% of the student’s course grade.

Second, there is the reflection process. More often than not, students go through university, acquire large amounts of information, pass exams, and write assignments without stopping and considering what their learning from the particular seminar or lecture is and how this can be put into practice. Usually, neither students nor educators take the time for this kind of reflection. Therefore, it is fundamental to schedule reflection time during and at the end of the seminar. With simple questions, such as “What were your AHA moments of the session?,” which the students answer in a learning log, up to discussion groups, students experience different kinds of reflection, both orally and written. Using a learning diary is a useful examination tool. It allows the students to reflect on the content, methodology, and the effects during their learning process. For us, as educators, we can learn from the students reflections what and potentially how to improve our learning setting. One possibility—which we apply in some seminars—is integrating the assignment and the learning reflection as the final examination, counting 60% of the individual student grade. In this combination, students had a written assignment about a specific topic of entrepreneurship plus a two pages reflection at the end of the assignment. Please note that with the reflection diary we are not referring to the commonly used evaluations form, which is also relevant, but has a very different purpose and content.

5 Final Recommendations

In all, we can see in the following quotes that this seminar helps students to have a new perspective on entrepreneurship or learning and even on their mindsets. These highly motivate us to follow this path of education and looking forward to exchange with you as our colleague scholars:

[T]his lecture has truly enriched my understanding of what entrepreneurship is. Personally, this is a big deal because the lecture has broadened my understanding of what entrepreneurs can do. Before, whenever I thought about entrepreneurship, my cognitive circuit would immediately associate entrepreneurship with financial benefits, big exit deals, and so on. I believe that my past experience of what entrepreneurship is has been skewed and misguided or at least was too narrow-minded for what entrepreneurship accounts for. (LMB38)

I finally experienced how to embrace mistakes, which was so far only a theoretical part of my management studies. Working in such an open-minded and dynamic surrounding, which does not force any result but supports the process itself, was the best condition to learn and practice failure management. This also includes the courage to start an imperfect project and adapt as well as improve it in the following process (working adaptive and iterative). (LMB48)

But somehow, the TSE module chained my mindset not only in questions of entrepreneurship but also in everyday consumption and behavior. I find myself taking care of buying more sustainable commodities and cosmetics as well as actively and critically deliberating my way of living. Especially facing my vocational search after my master’s thesis, I started to prioritize social instead of financial profit as a criterion of decision making. (LMB48)

With this chapter, we share our experience in designing, conducting, and improving the TSE seminar. We would like to encourage you as an educator in this field to implement it. When doing so take into consideration the following recommendations:

  1. 1.

    Set up a goal-oriented surrounding in entrepreneurship education. That is to educate students to contribute to tackling the grand societal challenges of our time by thinking and acting entrepreneurially. Our seminar is not about starting another new business, we aim at educating future pioneers that think entrepreneurially in all realms of society.

  2. 2.

    Apply the seminar’s five key elements: As explained in Sect. 4, the seminar was designed upon five key elements. The reflection on your role as educator is the starting point, which will enable you to move forward with creating a diverse, open, and protected space for learning, as well as facilitate an environment for creativity. Encourage the students to dare step outside accustomed ways of looking at the world. This will enable them to enter into a transformative learning process developing entrepreneurial competencies for tackling the grand challenges. In this process do not underestimate the importance for the students to understanding the real problem and research on this. We highly recommend to include real-world entrepreneurs in the seminar schedule. Finally, the examination tools should also give the students the possibility to reflect upon their learning process.

  3. 3.

    Include an official open-doors pitch event. Allow students to professionally pitch their entrepreneurial ideas to an actual diverse jury. With this, students can experience real-world feedback, besides the instructors’ feedback.

  4. 4.

    Co-teaching: From our experience, it is beneficial to implement and offer the seminar together with at least one co-educator. This opens up the opportunity for you as the educators to reflect upon the seminar’s setting and learning of the students, and thus helps you to optimize the seminar in order to enable a fruitful learning experience for the students.

  5. 5.

    Adapt to your own reality: We bring forward our recommendations for the implementation of the TSE seminar in order to present you with an attractive starting point. As we are aware that there exist different educational realities, we encourage you to adapt these to your needs. In this process, always keep in mind students’ best learning experience within your educational reality.