Entrepreneurship education through sustainability orientation – exploring a project initiating and structuring industry mentors

Abstract

Entrepreneurship education (EE) is about developing students’ ability to create economic, social, or cultural value. For sustainable development and achieving the SDGs, collaboration and new alliances will be of key importance. Collaboration can drive and enable innovative practices that bring benefits to the environment, society and organizations. A fully circular economy (CE), aiming to keep resources in economic cycles as long as possible, is required according to the European Green deal. In this paper the connection between sustainability, collaboration, and mentoring in entrepreneurship education has been strengthened. Two theoretical positions have been selected: (1) Entrepreneurship, sustainability and collaboration; and (2) Entrepreneurship education anchored in experiential learning and collaborative orientation in universities’ Third Mission. EE and entrepreneurial pedagogy lay out student centered principles for experiential learning, aiming to develop students’ creativity, opportunity orientation and innovation skills. Mentoring is an experiential learning concept, regarded as fruitful in higher education and widely used in the business industry. Student teams are often challenged with real-world problems. We explore a collaborative project initiating and structuring industry mentors. The educational setting is two courses at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL) with partially common educational activities. The course challenges come from organizations in the region and are rooted in sustainability and CE. During 2019 industry mentors were assessed in a pilot-project and implemented after proving the viability of the idea. Initiating industry mentors shows positive outcome, and the three main findings are: (1) Industry mentors seems to cover an important function and role the professors do not cover; (2) Engaging industry mentors confirms the perceived need for structure and a collaboration network; and (3) Applying industry mentor service can lead to more outward and practice-oriented professors and university. Sustainability orientation and external collaboration by industry mentors’ entails promising possibilities for experiential learning, knowledge development, networking, value creation, and educational re-directing in line with the Third Mission of Higher Education (HEI). A deeper understanding of entrepreneurial mentoring and the role of industry mentors is achieved. There is a need for further empirical examination.

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