Towards Entrepreneurship for a Cause: Educating Transformative Entrepreneurial Selves for a Better World

Abstract

In this essay we explore some central societal and educational problems that educators ought to address in order to support sustainability and we argue the need for educating transformative entrepreneurial selves, that is, students with abilities to muster and organize resources pursuing a cause. The current situation calls for youth to develop entrepreneurial competences that will give them the means to introduce and drive change through individual action. In so doing, we put forward the concept of entrepreneurship for a cause to challenge more traditional ideas of what entrepreneurship encompasses. For education, we subsequently suggest using the concept of entrepreneurship education for a cause. We argue that entrepreneurship education has an important role to play as an enabler, but one in which individual self-interests connected to business venturing are given less attention than reflections upon how each individual through decisive action can support the creation of a more sustainable society. Central to our argument is the insight that new ideas about meaning in life that will support changing society away from consumption towards sustainability need to be added as a leading dimension in any education with the aspiration of transforming the world through the actions of its students.

Introduction and Structure

Currently, mankind is consuming too many planets per year (Moore & Rees, 2013). Our way of life is not sustainable in the long run (Hoekstra & Wiedmann, 2014; Johnsen et al., 2017), although it can be argued that in many ways it has become better (Lomborg, 2003). On a general level, our political representatives also understand that this cannot go on (UN, 2015). The Paris agreement shows us that there is at least a political understanding of the problem (Falkner, 2016), although measures taken can hardly be considered sufficient, according to data from Bifrost (2022). In recent years, many activists, like Greta Thunberg, have held politicians accountable for the present situation, and even held them responsible for doing something about it. Young people are awakening, and many of them call for a different agenda (e.g. ReGeneration 2030, 2022). Indirectly it is also a call for a new education that will help youth build action competences and thus enable them to induce change in existing structures, build new structures and be the change they want to see, as expressed by Mahatma Gandhi. Youth, and mankind in general, need to develop new competences that will make it possible for ordinary people to step in and drive transformation where politics fall short. For this to happen, current and new educators have roles to play, and those roles are dependent on how we view the challenge and our understanding of why we need to change and what we need to learn to initiate and drive change. Hence, in this essay we explore some central societal and educational problems that educators ought to address in order to support sustainability and argue the need for educating transformative entrepreneurial selves, that is, students with abilities to muster and organize resources pursuing a cause.

The first part of the article we devote to the relationship between some central paradigmatic problems facing mankind and a path towards solutions of these problems, where we argue a fundamental need for an ethical awakening. From there, we focus on the youth where we see major alterations in the world’s educational systems as central to creating this ethical awakening in coming generations. By these alterations, we contend, schools and educational system will be able to release latent transformative potentials in youth and, thereby, enable them to evolve into their own versions of ethically grounded, transformative entrepreneurial selves. Through this process, where new education and new ideas evolve along with changes in society towards sustainability, eventually new paradigms will form along with supporting discourse and language. Where politicians fail, society needs to recreate itself and solve the paradigmatic problems the world stands before, we conclude, where we connect to the entrepreneur as being the instigator and driver of change, but here in the form of youth taking on new roles in a paradigm yet to be envisioned, constructed, and stabilized.

We base our approach primarily on the conceptual framework inspired by complementary ideas from three thinkers. Theodore Brameld, one of the central figures of the Reconstructivist school of educational philosophy, refers to the dual character of the times we live in: that of tremendous global threats and of unprecedented opportunities for reconstructing a united and just global society. He considers dedication to the latter, to the creation of a new world civilization, to be the main purpose of education. Brameld’s perspective was transformative, to the degree that he seems to have been largely dismissed by his contemporaries due to their inability to comprehend the depth of insight and the far-sighted vision communicated in his works. Today, decades after Brameld wrote his educational programme, his views come across as keenly describing the times we live in and his solutions as relevant and timely (Brameld, 1956, 1965, 1970). Our second thinker is the German-born, British sociologist Karl Mannheim, who already at the time and in the aftermath of World War II, spoke about the potential of youth as the spearheads of societal transformations, a need for which was rather obvious at the time (Mannheim, 2013). Finally, the conceptualization by Viktor Frankl (1966, 1985, 1987) of dedication to a cause or a person beyond attendance to one’s personal and egoistic needs and gains, where the idea of service to humanity, as the necessary requirement for a meaningful and mentally and existentially fulfilling life, is the third component of what could be referred to as our theoretical moorings. Together, these three viewpoints point us towards an urgent need for societal transformation (Brameld), personal, inner transformation (Frankl), and the young generation as the primary candidate to act as the protagonists, the avant-garde, of these necessary and complementary transformations (Mannheim). The conceptual framework brings forth the unique historical need and opportunity for what can be referred to as a fundamental entrepreneurial posture and mindset, both with regard to reconstructing society and reconstructing self, as well as the mechanisms to foster such transformative entrepreneurial agency.

Entrepreneurship Education as a Possible Enabler

The world’s climate problems are not the only major problems that the current societal order fails to address. Our way of life is unsustainable in many other ways, too. The Covid-19 pandemic, exploding in 2020, also questions how we live our lives, the density of mankind, the distribution of wealth, etc. Consumption, which has driven the economic machine so far and which upholds societies’ voracious desire for growth, is increasingly seen as the core problem (Johnsen et al., 2017; Kopnina, 2020; Nicholls, 2010; Washington, 2018). Furthermore, as societies develop, many more aspire to a way of life that is not sustainable for the planet or for the human race (Hoekstra & Wiedmann, 2014). What we need to see is a change in our societal system on a global level, a change in our collective mindset from the reproduction of the unsustainable to the transformation for sustainability. As entrepreneurship is about taking on challenges, acting on opportunities and introducing novelties, both entrepreneurship (e.g. Hall et al., 2010; Nicholls, 2010) and thereby entrepreneurship education have roles to play (e.g. Lans et al., 2014).

On a general level, there are indisputably continuous advancements in education, and they are about many things beside entrepreneurship. For instance Maqsood et al. (2021) describe how Covid-19 has forced education into a digital shift. Changes like this are of course important and can naturally be part of a paradigmatic shift towards sustainability, but they are not specifically targeted for this end. In fact, the great disparity among the global student population to benefit from such measures, the so-called digital divide, is in itself a clear indication that what is required is much more than some refined means to the existing ends. The change we address goes much deeper, where our concern is that a new global and collective mindset will be hard to obtain without educational systems supporting this change. Therefore, new approaches to education that will drive us towards sustainability are called for, where insights from research on entrepreneurship education show an evolving and vigorous field concerned with questions regarding how action competence can be both taught and learned (over the years e.g. Deuchar, 2004; Fayolle & Gailly, 2008; Fleck & Asmuth, 2021; Gibb, 2002; Hägg & Kurczewska, 2021; Kyrö, 2015; Lackéus et al., 2016; Leffler, 2006; Lindbergh & Schwartz, 2018; Neck & Greene, 2011; Pittaway & Cope, 2007; Pittaway & Thorpe, 2012; Wettermark, 2020).

With action competences, like those that can be learned through entrepreneurship education, youth as well as people in general will be able to lead change towards sustainability. Without them, we are most likely bound to linger on towards a grim future due to decades of imprinted but also limited ideas about what we can do, how we can do it and thus what competences education should be organized for. In this perspective, entrepreneurship education emerges as a possible enabler for new types of education with alternative means and for alternative goals. In this respect, our orientation is very similar to the conceptual framework formulated by Dodd et al. (2022). The authors apply fundamental notions from Alistair Anderson (e.g. 1995), centrally his view of entrepreneurship as ‘practices of transformative socio-economic engagement’ (Dodd et al., 2022, p. 696), and arrive at an ethically and morally oriented form of entrepreneurship constructed around the three aspects of sustainability, social justice, and hope. As they do, we likewise see education for entrepreneurship as a means to re-imagining and re-creating the world and, thus, its future. In our approach, education for entrepreneurship is based on the original deep structure of Schumpeter’s theory (1934) that we would reformulate as ‘creative reconstruction’. In other words, the theoretical underpinning of our notion of education for entrepreneurship is helping the young generations to understand the historical bifurcation point which humanity has arrived at and to prepare them for realizing their potential as the spearhead of the movement towards mutually complementary inner and outer transformation (Brameld, 1956; Frankl, 1966; Mannheim, 2013), that is, alternative goals compared to what usually leads education today.

Alternative Goals

The consumption-driven lifestyle of today is not only unsustainable in terms of ecological, social and economic factors. It also fails to address some of the most fundamental aspects of our humanity with respect to existential, ethical, and aesthetic perspectives on life, where youth need meaning in their life, as Mayseless and Keren (2014) points out. This is also the nucleus in our argument for developing an education that will not just learn youth to initiate and drive change but will help them energize their actions and suffer less from today’s dominating materialistic ideals.

According to Hill (2011) there is mounting evidence to suggest that children are suffering from serious physical, emotional and social deficits directly related to consumerism. For some time now, there has been mounting evidence showing that a materialistic value orientation is linked to lower well-being among all age groups (Dittmar, 2008; Kasser & Kanner, 2004). According to official figures from Sweden (SCB, 2017), about 50% of the youth in that country suffer from some form of mental health problem, and there is a current debate on how best to tackle this (Baralt, 2022). We acknowledge this problem, but to our understanding it is an intertwined societal and educational problem where we need new ideas on how to break and reverse current trends. Unfortunately, we do not see much political activity that can take this leap of thought and initiate more fundamental change. The organization of dominating educational systems builds on imprinted thinking patterns, for instance, how divisions of labour and time can be used to enhance productivity towards a given goal. Education thus becomes constructed by and for an existing way of life, upholding existing societal beliefs. It is not primarily constructed to challenge the existing order. No wonder we tend to view schools as factories that divide children into cohorts in order to produce a standardized output where power is used to discipline deviants into conformity. Although this metaphor of course has its limits (Davis et al., 2020) it would be fair to say that a school that would encourage deviants probably should be designed in other ways than we are used to.

As we understand it, we need to change on at least two levels in society to move forward. Firstly, on the macro level, we need to create paradigmatic structures that resolve the conflict between, on the one hand, growth and societal prosperity, and on the other hand, sustainability and existential human wellbeing. Secondly, on the micro level, we need to create new paradigmatic ideas on how we as individuals can and should live our lives, what kind of a worldview we need to adopt, and what competences we need to acquire. Consequently, we need to address questions about how we educate for, in, through and about these paradigmatic changes and those new values, attitudes, and competences that will make them possible to achieve.

The paradigm shifts referred to above are by no means uncontested. Even among scientists, there are those who regard human influence on climate change as a scientifically unsupported myth. There are significant political parties around the world that not only see no reason for a shift to a new paradigm of worldviews and societal structures, but rather promote a return to past ways of thinking, structuring, and behaviour. Such backward-looking groups aside, the holy cow of consumerism and perpetual economic growth is persistent even in the Global Goals for Sustainable Development. This is not surprising, as departure from this economic dogma would require fundamental and initially, no doubt, disturbing re-arrangements and adjustments that could easily incite popular unrest and anger. The fact, however, remains that the longer the inevitable transformations are delayed, the higher the price and the greater the degree of difficulty for necessary changes to be implemented. We can call to mind such early warning signals already in the 1970s as the report by the Club of Rome ‘The Limits to Growth’ (Meadows et al., 1972) and Alvin Toffler’s ‘Future Shock’ (1970), and reflect on how differently things would have evolved, had we heeded these calls for transformative action.

A need For An Ethical Awakening

In order to succeed in challenging current systems, some kind of ethical awakening is most likely needed (Frankl, 1966; 1985; 1987). Washington (2018) describes it as a need to infuse the young with ‘a sense of wonder’ and emphasizes that sensing tells us that change is not just about thinking, it is also about feeling. It is a pervasive awareness of meaning, of a purpose in life, and the resulting deep sense of happiness (Frankl, 1987; Zohar, 2005), to be distinguished from the kind of superficial and temporary positive feeling created by material consumption. Articulations of this type of common need can be found in the discussion around present society’s (in)ability to organize itself to battle Covid-19, where the ideas and needs expressed by states and citizens often clash. The current situation also suggests that meaning in itself is not enough, but that we as a society also need hope for the future, as Obama (2007) has so eloquently described: a hope and a shared vision that can build a positive momentum for change (c.f. Dodd et al., 2022; Wettermark, 2020). In order to make it possible for us to reason about ethical questions related to this need, and other meanings in life than those related to rationality, economics and material thinking, we require a discourse and language for it, according to Chertkovskaya (2017). This language will then make it possible for us to discuss how we should organize an envisioned sustainable society, and with that, our educational systems. Our educational systems are key, as they have the potential of reaching out to everyone, everywhere, with messages of hope and from early ages induce a sense of wonder of the world (Brameld, 1970; Washington, 2018). Such an education will help us create and exchange visions for a more sustainable future and in the process introduce, develop, and implement a new common language on one hand along with skills for change and action on the other. As language will be both an instigator for actions of change as well as a result from that change, we need to probe into concept building and new types of texts that will guide us in the process, of which this essay can be viewed as a humble example.

This development process is not something that is unique or new to education or any advancement in society. In education, the divorce of rational and dogmatic modes of thinking often associated with the enlightenment process (e.g. Conrad, 2012; Himmelfarb, 2008) has led to a problematic segregation and dichotomization of scientific rationality from existential, ethical, and aesthetical perspectives on life. In a way, through the years, science has lost its soul where emphasis on reason has made the creation of current society possible in many ways, with all its advances as well as shortcomings. Left to its own devices, science, and its offspring, technology, have created a Janus-faced social reality. On the one hand, scientific and technological progress has provided us, for the first time in human history, with the means of securing material wellbeing for all of humanity. Yet, we can see that some old menaces to human flourishing persist: poverty, hunger, and war are far from abolished. In addition to that, our science and technology, like an autoimmune disease, have, in some cases, turned against us, creating novel problems, such as environmental degradation and weapons of mass destruction, and in their wake war and war again. It is at this point that we can truly see a need for reinstating the development of an ethically grounded soul as a prime concern for education (Frankl, 1966, 1985, 1987). By doing this, education will support the evolvement of transformative ideas among youth (Mannheim, 2013) who in turn have the potential of influencing the common societal discourse and thus lead the way towards an ethical awakening among the many.

The Transformative Potential of the Youth

Greta Thunberg and movements arising from her actions, as an example, has shown that many young people are not accepting the current situation. New ideas are spreading among youth where several initiatives also show that they are fully capable of developing ethically grounded arguments and pointing to alternative futures. Some of them are also taking things into their own hands, organizing themselves around ideas that challenge present societal order (e.g. ReGeneration 2030, 2022). Their initiatives point to a complementary type of entrepreneurial action, concerned with changing society, not by organizing resources for business but organizing resources for another type of end. By their own actions some youths are now building their own action competence, alas not supported by present educational systems. Youth have a potential of becoming many things, as Benson et al. (2007) show, but several of the most significant among these inherent possibilities are not realized, or even recognized. Reflecting upon it, Greta Thunberg’s school strike has a much deeper meaning than just skipping school to voice a political concern. If today’s schools do not support your development into what you deem necessary, maybe you not only could but also should turn your attention elsewhere to release your transformative potential.

As touched upon earlier, to perpetuate itself, society uses the educational system as a reproductive tool. Hence, schools become standardizing institutions where individual success is often measured by the volume of good grades, which perhaps few like but most have learned to accept. The known present is a most pervasive medium to which we adapt (McLuhan, 1964). Students at schools, and even in universities, are not typically inspired by ideas of transforming the world, but are, rather, seduced by visions of being able to secure an economically rewarding position in society (du Plessis & Ahmed, 2020). Consequently, many young people by will, force, circumstance or ignorance metaphorically prostitute themselves mentally by learning, often simply memorizing, facts that have no particular meaning in their lives, here and now, in the hope of a reward in an educational afterlife (Cunningham, 2019). Educational establishments, therefore, become places of adaptation to the current system, rather than acting as spaces for transformation (Davidson, 2017). Their role is mainly to uphold current power structures, not change or transform them, thus becoming a significant part of the problem (Brameld, 1956; 1965; 1970).

This also means that the precious period of childhood and adolescence is mostly turned into a limbo, a period of waiting for the real life and true agency, in any sense, or worse, a period of cultivation for a coming harvest by others. Youth as a recourse and force for change is hardly recognized by existing educational systems, and even less used, although some initiatives speak of aspiring changes (e.g. Nemesis, 2021). The broad potential (Namdar, 2012), and with it an entrepreneurial potential, inherit in every individual, is successively lost over the years spent inside current traditional educational systems (Johannisson, 2009; Johannisson & Madsén, 1997). Tragically, the innately questioning mind of the young is re-programmed into a fixation for the right answer that leads to good grades (Cunningham, 2019). Within the dominating educational paradigm, students are often given the misleading impression that the answers to all important questions already exist, and it is just a matter of them learning all these answers, while the reality is, of course, exactly the opposite. Instead, students need to learn how to construct new answers based on both what we know and what we can find out while striving for a new vision. That is, they need to learn how to learn and in the process gain action competence in constructively confronting problems along with a new language that make it possible for them to communicate answers that at the start of the process lacked appropriate words. This learning process is not new, but the change of context is. If we want to create change through education, students are not to look backwards for answers that will support a malfunctioning system but look forward and use new insights to make malfunctioning societal systems obsolete. By moving in this direction the entrepreneurial potential that, for instance, Johannisson (2009) claims is lost over the years in traditional educational systems, will instead be released and nurtured. It is a move towards an educational system that will support the growth of transformative entrepreneurial selves.

It should, however, be noted that the invitation to assume a transformative entrepreneurial posture is not necessarily welcomed by young people. As pointed out above, many young people have either bought into the prevalent materialistic and individualistic discourse and are trying their utmost to find their place in the sun or are happy to assume the consumerist role into which adult economic interests are luring them. Obviously, youth are far from a homogenous psycho-social cohort. Our educational systems, on the one hand, need to better support those who understand and accept the challenge to rise as transformative agents to reconstruct themselves and the societal structures their lives are embedded in. On the other hand, we need to find ways of counteracting and redirecting the energies of those young people who either willingly adapt to the existing unsustainable systems or choose to live their lives in parallel, criminal, or otherwise destructive, societal spaces. In this sense, the changes we propose are clearly ideologically driven and can be explained by the cause we pursue, which of course is nothing new to entrepreneurship. It is just that we propose a change in ideology (cf. Berglund, 2013; Saari & Harni, 2016).

The Transformative Entrepreneurial Self

The entrepreneurial self as a theoretical concept emerged as part of a neo-liberal movement in society in the closing decades of the 20th century. Citizens should no longer be dependent on society but become self-reliant (Peters, 2001), which called for an entrepreneurial self. In schools, this was first translated into a curriculum for being able to start and manage businesses of one’s own. But curricula are open to pursuing other ways of reaching one’s own goals, usually interpreted as something that is good for oneself (Berglund, 2013; Saari & Harni, 2016). The student should also work with herself/himself to become skilled in meeting current demands set by others, like a potential market. All this is quite in line with the current dominating and detrimental growth paradigm, although Kauppinen and Daskalaki (2015) argue that entrepreneurship also entails a subversive organizing practice, a movement towards what is to come, challenging the present.

In the wake of this development, entrepreneurship theory (and ideology) found its way mainly to curricula of secondary schools (e.g. Skolverket, 2011b; 2011a) and higher education, and with that came an increasing interest in entrepreneurial learning, focusing on learning in and through entrepreneurship, balancing earlier focus on learning for and about entrepreneurship (Hoppe, 2016b; Hoppe et al., 2017; Hägg & Kurczewska, 2021), and then mainly with a business perspective. However, there is nothing that prevents entrepreneurship from being about other causes, for example, applied in order to attain sustainability (Kyrö, 2015), which can be labelled a broad approach to entrepreneurship. Still, the ideal entrepreneurial self, in this existing perspective, upholds a flexible mind and is adaptable to varying demands on the self, subordinating that self to the current order.

Through this movement, entrepreneurship became a popular term, not to say a most political term, and has since been put forward as the solution to many societal problems (Hoppe, 2016b). The message has been that, through the actions of the entrepreneur, society would once again prosper. Through this conceptualization of entrepreneurship as a miraculous cure for everything inherent in the realm of politics, the term entrepreneurship successively lost theoretical stringency (Hoppe, 2016a; 2016b) and multiple characterizations of what is central to entrepreneurship have emerged (New World Encyclopedia Contributors, 2020). This, in turn, gave rise to critique of the rather one-sided idea of entrepreneurship as something good, along with a more negative interpretation of the entrepreneurial self (Berglund, 2013; Bröckling, 2015), and with the rise of negative connotations the usage of the entrepreneurial self-concept decreased in this context.

Now, we argue that it is time to reclaim the entrepreneurship concept in general, and that of an entrepreneurial self in particular, as a much-needed competence for solving societal problems. This time, however, not by starting businesses or reaching limited personal goals, but by starting movements and organizations for the transformation of society towards sustainability. In a sense, it would be an elongation of the broad approach to entrepreneurship (Kyrö, 2015). The relationship between the entrepreneurial self and self-efficacy is long since established (Peters, 2001). Entrepreneurship education is also open to this move, where education not necessarily has to revolve around an enterprise but can have other types of goals and contexts (Berglund, 2013; Hoppe et al., 2017; Hägg & Kurczewska, 2021). The type of resurrection of entrepreneurship we propagate is dominated by a new type of ethical dimension, ideas of sustainability and ideas of values and goals beyond financial gain. However, that is not enough. We also need educators who understand this challenge and are willing to change themselves and their institutions in order to facilitate the rise of a new kind of entrepreneur with a creative reconstructive and transformative competence (Anderson, 1995; Davidson, 2017; Dodd et al., 2022; Wettermark, 2020).

Learning Towards New Ends

Concluding from what has been covered, schools, education and educational systems need to change. First, we need to acknowledge human individuals as true subjects (with all kinds of individual characteristics and needs rather than homogenous objects suitable for a standardized learning process) of education. Secondly, we need an alignment of educational institutions with the future-creating, transformative needs of society (rather than acting as a reproductive machinery for adaptation to the present system). It is a move away from teaching institutions and formal education to the learning individual, which in turn stresses the need for an ethical reflective capacity within each individual that can direct her or his attention, actions and learning to what is most important for instigating needed changes. The suggested paths align well with what Pittaway and Cope (2007) describe as simulated entrepreneurial learning (learn as entrepreneurs learn) and what Schön (1983) would describe as learning resulting from reflection in action (cf. Hägg & Kurczewska, 2021), where we would also like to emphasize that failure is a great opportunity for learning, as advocated by Pittaway and Thorpe (2012), for example. And fail we most likely will, over and over again, in the search for paths towards a more sustainable world order. In purely educational terms, these orientations resonate with the philosophy of reconstructivism and a number of more recent educational thinkers (e.g. Acosta, 2017; Andreotti, 2016) as well as those classical thinkers that inspire us (Brameld, 1956; 1965; 1970; Frankl, 1966; 1985; 1987; Mannheim, 2013). Most fundamentally, they call for a new worldview and a set of guiding principles underlying it (Namdar, 2012).

Entrepreneurship for a Cause

The transformative entrepreneurial self has to, indeed, imply not merely outward oriented entrepreneurial action but a metacognitive and reflective attitude towards the self, an inner entrepreneurial process (Fleck & Asmuth, 2021). What we can see, thus, is that we need a paradigmatic shift of how to view entrepreneurship in society, as something that drives change and not necessarily creates businesses (Lindbergh & Schwartz, 2018). Essentially, this is a call for a new mindset, a different worldview and a new language (Chertkovskaya, 2017) for entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education. We call these adaptations still to take form entrepreneurship for a cause (EC) that subsequently should be supported by an entrepreneurship education for a cause (EEC).

Greta Thunberg is a great example of a complementary type of entrepreneur, but she cannot stand alone, and not everyone can be a new Greta Thunberg. Nor can education be geared to creating just one type of entrepreneur. Instead, each transformative entrepreneurial self must find moorings in his or her life-world and circumstances. Hence, we should not expect all transformative entrepreneurial selves to have the same competences and profiles, nor should their educations be identical. Instead, the success of each cause-driven entrepreneur will be determined by the fit between their own competences and the tasks they take on themselves, meaning their own personal entrepreneurial profile must be contextually adapted to be successful. Thereby, the role of an alleged traditional entrepreneurial hero is not applicable. Instead, it is about a potential within every human being where local heroism emerges in collaboration and interaction with others and one’s social context. The transformative challenge facing humanity calls for the activation of this latent heroism in as many people as possible, which of course could be described as part of awakening a most personal internal creative superhero, as Fleck and Asmuth (2021) argue.

Officially, there will of course be some future entrepreneurs we can call heroes as their simplified and arranged stories will be easily conveyed through whatever media the future has to offer. Interestingly though, we expect their success to be determined by other standards than business growth and profit margin. Just as today, however, we also expect to have a very good critical debate on whether these heroes are good representatives of all types of entrepreneurs, and just as today the answer will be no. There is a myriad of ways to become and act out a transformative entrepreneurial self, at least in our understanding of the term.

Building an educational system and society for fostering and harbouring this new type of entrepreneurship for a cause would be a leap for the wellbeing of mankind, where an added ethical dimension will supply us with a more sustainable foundation for creating meaning in our lives than the dominating material paradigm does.

A move in this direction, changing our view of entrepreneurship in society, also calls for a complementary definition of entrepreneurship, where we suggest ‘the ability to muster and organize resources pursuing a cause’. Building a definition around pursuing a cause, which in this case would be anything from saving the neighbourhood to saving the planet, would give the entrepreneurship concept a direction along with an ethical dimension that truly contrasts many previous ideas for entrepreneurship as mainly constituting the art and knowledge of how to enrich oneself (although this can also be seen as a cause, which strengthens the suggested definition). Furthermore, entrepreneurship for a cause directs us to a holistic view of the required transformations, a move away from identifying various single problems and trying to solve them as isolated phenomena. A broader perspective on causes for entrepreneurship, and problematizing what causes can be from the global to the local, will complement existing entrepreneurial educations. Already in the EE of today we teach transformative action competences, but by adding a variety of causes to the curricula, today’s courses and educations can themselves start to transform towards building agency for societal change beyond what an enterprise as sole means has the potential to do.

The concept of entrepreneurship for a cause is constructed upon the premises of the conceptual framework introduced in the beginning of this article. Frankl presents dedication to a cause as the necessary and foundational prerequisite for any practice of human agency that would not easily lead to egoism and narcissism. Brameld defines the creation of a new global civilization and the fostering of world citizenship as the most urgent and the highest order cause to dedicate our efforts to. Finally, Mannheim argues that the young people are best suited and embody the hope for spearheading service to such a cause. As already pointed out, this is a definition of entrepreneurship decisively different from the traditional notion of someone acting innovatively for the advancement of their personal financial prosperity.

Concluding Thoughts – Educating Transformative Entrepreneurial Selves

In this essay, we have discussed pressing educational and societal problems along with ideas on how we can shift education towards releasing entrepreneurial potential in youth. By building on the broad approach to entrepreneurship, already inherent in entrepreneurship education, educators in the field have the chance to be forerunners in this shift. In the process we argue the need to address questions regarding ethics and meaning that will support the growth of alternative societal visions and ideas among youth that in turn will act as goals to strive for and causes to pursue, challenging existing systems dependence on consumerism as driving principle. Where politics appear to be unable to take necessary steps towards creating a sustainable society, initiatives and action must come from alternative conglomerations, like the educated youth. Moving education in this direction will hopefully also make students feel better as their time in school will be about other things than striving for good grades, adhering to given authorities and waiting for life to begin.

In this take on an education for fostering transformative entrepreneurial selves, which we call entrepreneurship education for a cause, the good for oneself is secondary to a necessary societal transformation for what is good for mankind. Entrepreneurship for a cause is not done for traditional personal enrichment but has the cause of helping mankind to survive and prosper. We call this individual capability the transformative entrepreneurial self, and we call upon others to engage in this movement of releasing that potentiality. Society can still be transformed into something better, and that is by engaging ourselves, and in these engagements have faith that sustainability is possible to reach through new kinds of actions and ways of thinking. Of course, we need entrepreneurs in this change, but they will differ from those we traditionally label as entrepreneurial as they will be more concerned with changing the dominating paradigm than working on themselves and their business to fit into it. Nonetheless, starting enterprises could still be a means, but then probably as non-profit in order to challenge current systems (Hinton & Maclurcan, 2017) and work for a change in societies’ leading paradigm.

This is not as far-fetched as it might seem. The transformation suggested here is actually just a twist on old ideas. Schumpeter (1934) explained how societies and economies constantly renewed themselves and grew through the acts of entrepreneurs, where old structures were creatively destructed and replaced with new structures that used resources more efficiently, were better, more effective and/or had a higher value to society. His ideas are still valid in understanding entrepreneurship and innovation, where our contribution is mainly to put forward the entrepreneurial potential in everybody, especially the youth, and season it with strong ethical convictions of creating a better place for all of us, a lasting place, a sustainable place.

As politics today seems to be incapable of taking necessary action, as it is itself caught in the paradigm that needs to be transformed; it is down to each of us as individuals to create the momentum needed. What would then be better than moving towards entrepreneurship for a cause and redesigning all education from the early toddling years, through the school system and university, to the nursing home, to facilitate this change in essential mindset and life competence? The much-debated entrepreneurial self may thus not be such a bad idea after all. What that idea has lacked most might just be a moral compass and a cause worth pursuing: the fundamental existential, ethical, and aesthetic aspects of human nature. This is the main addition we are advocating through a redesign of education so that instead of fostering an adaptive mindset and competence it would nurture transformative mindsets and transformative competences. That is an educational system that would support the becoming of transformative entrepreneurial selves.

An objection may be understandably voiced about the possibility of transforming the educational system without radical changes taking place within the political sphere that controls public education through national curricula and the like. In response to such an objection, we would like to point to the ‘scope for action’ (Berg, 2011) available in each educational system and each policy document regulating it. There is an unused potential, room for interpretation, and legitimate possibilities for new initiatives within every school system. The call is, then, for teachers to release their own transformative entrepreneurial potential and just start. A closer study of what that might imply and require must be the theme of a separate text. Here, we simply refer to this possibility to clarify why we realistically see a possibility for a transformation emerging from an entrepreneurship education of youth and thus the grassroots of the many, that is, closer to the ground and the soil where the energy rests.