Thomas Lans visiting professor ‘Sustainable Entrepreneurship Education’ University of Teramo, Italy.

There is more and more attention in Life Sciences universities in Europe to foster sustainable entrepreneurship mind-sets among students and staff. While entrepreneurship education is traditionally about learning to identify and evaluate entrepreneurial opportunities, sustainable entrepreneurship goes one step further: emphasizing the value oriented character of the decisions made within this value creation process. It entails making trade-offs between economic, social and environmental values without, a priori, choosing one over another – even if this entails tensions and conflicts.

From an education point of view it concerns the development of additional competencies like systems thinking, normative competence, but also competencies like strategic action competence and foresighted thinking. The visiting professorship at Teramo is part of larger Erasmus+ project, called INTRINSIC, in which European Life Sciences Universities, and the umbrella organization ICA join forces to start developing designated learning trajectories in sustainable entrepreneurship.

One of these learning trajectories will be designed and piloted at the University of Teramo in 2020. See www.intrinsic.eu for more information.