Description:

This course is all about you and your ideas, purposeful doings, sustainability and teamwork.

In Entrepreneurship with Purpose, students learn about the characteristics of entrepreneurial ventures that are driven by a dual mission: a strong social, societal and/or ecological purpose alongside economic goals. They learn about, discuss, and reflect upon social and economic purpose during ideation, team building and business modelling. They get acquainted with ideas, tools, processes and methods from various "practices" in business and organisations, like Theory U, New Work and Design.

You students are invited to reflect upon and critically explore if and how social/ecological and economic purpose can be potentially aligned in entrepreneurial ventures. Individually and in teamwork, you reflect upon how personal values can drive the various blocks of a venture creation process. You experiment in teams to deal with potentially conflicting values and interests to jointly find out how to align them in a collectively created idea.

In the course, the concept of regeneration, the process Theory U and contemplation and expression through arts are used to explore how an entrepreneurial mindset can foster action towards sustainable activities.

The idea of regeneration is to nurture and restore natural ecosystem. In the course, we ask how you can apply entrepreneurship to integrate nature, its value and its limited capacities into you team’s venture and, generally, into business activities.

Theory U is a process and method developed and applied by the Presencing Institute (Otto Scharmer, Katrin Kaeufer & team). Its methods and tools are used in the course to explore individual values and mindsets. It frames the teamwork. It is used as an approach for reflection, co-creation and as one potential perspective on necessary societal transformations.

In contemplations on arts and as form of expression, you deal with arts both in theory and in practice. You wilil look at art for inspiration and to engage with its critical power. You will make art to express, reflect and, yet again, look. Through arts, we engage with different aspects of entrepreneurship, like the consideration of stakeholders, prototyping, and the integration of nature in business activities.

Learning Targets:

You’ll learn about

• 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations
• Earth’s systems and planetary boundaries
• Regenerative or hybrid organizations
• Theory U as process and method
• Purpose for the individual and the enterprise
• Values in the individual, a team and for a business
• Organization, roles and functions in a team
• (Digital) tools for organization, idea development and project execution
• Business Model Canvas for understanding and building business ideas
• Business Model Canvas and Sustainability
• Idea development, design thinking tools and thinking 

This course allows you to collect credits for the Sustainable Education Certificate (BNE)

Outline:

For a successful completion of the course, active and regular participation is needed. Why? You'll be working in teams everyone in a team wants to have equal and fair learning and contribution parts. Plus, it is all about your ideas.

Active participation contains "homework" that is prepared in advance for single sessions. What does this mean? You'll be continuously working on and for your own idea. You will also be developing them throughout the course. Regular participation in activities is simply more fun for all. This concerns specifically tools and methods used for ideation processes as well as concerning applications of Theory U - again all for you and your ideas. Regular pitches of the current state of work are part of the course, too.

While this may all sound a lot - the most important thing is that you have time in this course to pursue your own ideas, discover yourself and what is important to you and how you can create purposeful ventures through this. And throughout all this, we won't forget to have fun :) 

Sessions with input and teamwork will alternate with sessions of self-studying individually and in teams.

Literature:

Literature will be given in class next to video and audio material. 

It is beneficial for students to get acquainted with concepts in and ideas behind the Business Model Canvas (BMC). For this, you'll receive access to an online course on the BMC after your registration. You'll have about 4 weeks to complete the online course before our joint seminar starts. 

• Osterwalder, A., Pigneur, Y., Bernarda, G., & Smith, A. (2015). Value proposition design: How to create products and services customers want. John Wiley & Sons.
• Osterwalder, Alexander, Pigneur, Yves. (2011): Business Model Generation, Frankfurt am Main 2011.
• Scan through the book, get an idea and zoom into the nine sections of the BMC, so you have an idea prior to the course, what the sections entail.

Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time to get to know the business model canva – we’ll provide access to more material.

Methods of Assessment:

Portfolio: a) Frequent presentation of results (throughout). b) Final presentation of results in last session (22.10.2025) c) written report (approx. 10 pages, deadline 09.11.2025, 23:59h)