Responsible Innovation in University Entrepreneurship Education: Towards an Integrative Teaching Framework

In times of profound transformation, we seek societal and technological innovations which serve sustainable development in economic, environmental and social equity domains. As a response to these needs in public interest, the concept of responsible innovation (RI) has been put forward by academics as a solution to face these grand challenges (Owen et al., 2013; Von Schomberg, 2013). RI endorses the development and implementation of innovative business models and products that serve sustainability goals, especially in the context of entrepreneurial activity. Entrepreneurs have the ability to identify opportunities which contribute to sustainable development by creating new enterprises that serve society and initiate positive change (Byers et al., 2011).

Existing research suggests that responsibility-oriented entrepreneurs are driven by their values, motives and attitudes when they pursue the creation of sustainable business models and products (Patzelt & Shepherd, 2011; Tur-Porcar, 2018). Those drivers can be facilitated and strengthened through a variety of channels, including education and mentoring (Sung & Park, 2018). Evidence propounds that university education has a considerable impact on attitudes, values, and thinking of potential entrepreneurs and their future entrepreneurial activities (Raposo & Do Paco, 2011, Lans et al., 2014). ... mehrYet, not much systematically processed knowledge exists on how teaching formats in university education may be designed to specifically target critical thinking abilities of potential entrepreneurs with respect to RI. Despite the emergence of academic concepts such as social entrepreneurship or ecopreneurship (Schaltegger & Wagner, 2011), entrepreneurship education is still dominated by traditional business and management perspectives and a narrow “profit-first mentality” (Lourenco et al., 2013). Discussion of sustainability issues is usually limited to introductory lectures or seminars on abstract conceptual questions concerning business ethics or corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the context of multinational corporations (Freeman, 1984; Palazzo & Scherer, 2008) applicability of such teaching content to specific issues in the context of RI is very limited.
We address this gap in a collaborative teaching and research project by two institutional units at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), including the Institute for Entrepreneurship, Technology Management, and Innovation (EnTechnon) and the Academy for Responsible Research, Teaching, and Innovation (ARRTI). In our project we introduce a teaching format to entrepreneurship students in which we focus on principles of philosophical reasoning and ethical issues which can emerge in entrepreneurial environments. In the context of RI we have identified three domains of ethical reflection which we consider central to our teaching objective: (1) The individual domain (focus on individual mindfulness of entrepreneurs, e.g. creating awareness for individual core values or sustainable self-management); (2) the product domain (focusing on ideation and development aspects, e.g. carbon foot prints in product development processes); (3) the societal domain (effects of entrepreneurial business activities or specific product features on society, e.g. social justice issues such as gender and race equity in AI algorithm development). In our paper and conference presentation we would like to share the insights generated in or case study and explore future paths for a more systematic approach towards RI in entrepreneurship education.