Successful entrepreneurship relies on the development of an idea and its execution in such a way that value is captured. The idea of value, however, is often framed solely as market return, rather than a more inclusive understanding of value as social good. Ethical and normative considerations are often ‘nice to have’ and treated, if at all, as an add-on rather than an integrated part of doing business. In this paper, I describe a pedagogical module for ‘sustainability entrepreneurs’ that has been developed as part of an MSc course at Imperial College London. Students are challenged to develop business models that have a well-integrated environmental, social and economic value proposition and challenge the dominant neoliberal business rhetoric. The key skill developed through the module is critical reflexivity. This allows students to see that they could shape the world through their own agency and break out of conventional modes of doing business to place values at the heart of their business models.
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