Dear Colleagues,

While entrepreneurship was originally primarily valued for its contribution to economic growth, its potential for the solution of societal and environmental problems is acknowledged as well. Over the last decade, the notion of sustainable entrepreneurship has gained more and more interest. Sustainable entrepreneurship is often used as an umbrella term, and may include (combinations of) social entrepreneurship (e.g., not-for-profit entrepreneurship), ecopreneurship (e.g., customer focussed eco-products) or intrapreneurship (e.g., sustainable innovations) (for a detailed discussion of the notion sustainable entrepreneurship see Schaltegger and Wagner, 2011). What seems to be core in the field of sustainable entrepreneurship is that sustainable entrepreneurs conceive social or environmental problems primarily as new business opportunities and with their entrepreneurial activities, they contribute to social, ecological and economic developments in our society.

Whether the outcome is an eco-innovation, sustainable start-up or project, entrepreneurial thinking and acting starts first of all with motivated individuals and their ideas. In order to be able to identify, evaluate and enact sustainable business opportunities, sustainable entrepreneurs are in need of specific knowledge—e.g. knowledge of the natural environment for instance (Patzelt and Shepherd, 2011)—attitudes—e.g., the active involvement in sustainable actions to improve the sustainability of products, processes or services—and skills—e.g., to interact and to be responsive to stakeholder demands. It is likely that these knowledge, attitudes and skills stem from competencies for sustainable entrepreneurship. Although (higher) education is acclaimed to play an important role in laying the foundation for sustainable entrepreneurship competence, what learning factors contribute to developing such capacities is unclear. Both the fields of entrepreneurship education (EE), as well as the field of education for sustainable development (ESD) and many adjacent fields—like Business Ethics and Human Resource Management/Development—have their own ideas about what learner factors, learning environment characteristics and learning activities contribute to desired educational outcomes. There is even less work that empirically investigates these relations, including the opportunities, challenges and dilemma’s that sustainable entrepreneurship education may impose. The purpose and ambition of this special issue is to build on existing work (see the list of leading papers in the field) and to report on the state of the art of research on sustainable entrepreneurship in education as well as to elicit emerging topics, issues and challenges that need to be addressed in future research. Submissions for the special issue could relate, but are not limited, to the following topics:

• Modern learning/working environments—e.g., hybrid environments, living lab type of learning environments—that enable the development sustainable entrepreneurship.
• Diversity of sustainable entrepreneurship education outcomes, such as values, moral competence, systems thinking or foresighted thinking. Not referring to reporting on new ‘laundry lists’ of competencies.
• A normative-ethical approach to sustainable entrepreneurship (in education), to investigate the role of for instance moral competence further.
• Methodological advancement in measuring and assessing the processes and outcomes of sustainable entrepreneurship in education.
• The inherent tension in sustainable entrepreneurship education between the economic ‘profit-first’ logic and the ‘others-first/societal’ logic.
• Sustainable entrepreneurship education from the perspective of learning in the professions, e.g., in relation to corporate social responsibility, employee-driven innovation or workplace learning.
• The role of teachers in realizing modern sustainable entrepreneurship education processes and outcomes.

Research suggestions to build on:

Corcoran, P. B., Weakland, J. P., & Wals, A. E. (Eds.). (2017). Envisioning futures for environmental and sustainability education. Wageningen Academic Publishers.

Nabi, G., Liñán, F., Fayolle, A., Krueger, N., & Walmsley, A. (2017). The impact of entrepreneurship education in higher education: A systematic review and research agenda. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 16(2), 277-299.

Lourenço, F., Jones, O., & Jayawarna, D. (2013). Promoting sustainable development: The role of entrepreneurship education. International Small Business Journal, 31(8), 841-865.

Biberhofer, P., Lintner, C., Bernhardt, J., Rieckmann, M. (2018): Facilitating work performance of sustainability-driven entrepreneurs through higher education - The relevance of competencies, values, worldviews and opportunities. The International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation. https://doi.org/10.1177/1465750318755881.

Ploum, L., Blok, V., Lans, T., & Omta, O. (2017). Toward a Validated Competence Framework for Sustainable Entrepreneurship. Organization & Environment, 1086026617697039.

Blok, V., Gremmen, B., & Wesselink, R. (2016). Dealing with the wicked problem of sustainability: The role of individual virtuous competence. Business and Professional Ethics Journal.

Dr. Thomas Lans
Dr. Vincent Blok
Dr. Lisa Ploum
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Education for Sustainable Entrepreneurship
• Entrepreneurship Education
• Learning for Sustainable Entrepreneurship
• Learning Factors
• Learning Processes
• Learning Environment
• Learning Outcomes.