Abstract:

Courses aiming to form the entrepreneurial mindset of students are of high importance in the fast-changing technological and business environment. Education programs that provide subjects to improve innovative thinking have an advantage in international cooperation. Specific master and bachelor programs offer elective courses and specializations in social entrepreneurship, ethical design, and corporate social responsibility, but there are only marginal examples where social responsibility as a potential competitive advantage is an essential part of those entrepreneurial education frameworks that target the future founders of profit-oriented innovative ventures. Vice versa, social entrepreneurship education rarely focuses on marketable social innovations and usually targets persons who want to solve community-based problems and help those whose needs are unmet. In the intersection of these two different main concepts, there are no mature education experiences, so in my paper, I outline some potential ways to unfold this complex approach. As educator and designer of entrepreneurial mindset forming courses, I would like to make known my journey how I identified an uncovered niche in entrepreneurial education in relation to the creating of positive social impact from the birth of innovative ventures and how co-designing with students in a pilot elective course led to the highlighting of the main questions and challenges of this domain. The course aimed to provide examples and theoretical interdependencies that can contribute to the embedding of social responsibility from the early stages of the product development processes. The goal is that the future entrepreneurs and leaders who complete this elective course will have an approach that can lead to higher-level solutions which- while being really innovative, provide market-leading digital solutions – consider aspects like inclusion and safety, either. Embedding social responsibility can bring more competitive and reliable solutions in the digital transformation, disruptive digital processes with embedded social responsibility will have their distinctive characteristics in the market competition. In my paper, I will also report on how general misconceptions had to be dissolved in relation to social impact and social entrepreneurship and what kind of new paths in entrepreneurial education were discovered with computer science students who have already completed a basics entrepreneurship course. I will introduce how this bold experiment - combining the experience and mission-oriented approaches of social entrepreneurship with the obvious aim of tech ventures to be market-leading and profitable – unfolded and what factors to the definition of innosocial aspects were identified. In my introduction, I will write about how the pandemic redrew the original plans and what opportunity it meant in the possible applicable methods and discussable topics. Feedbacks of the participants will be analyzed from the aspect of further improvement opportunities, also to different audiences. Based on the experiences, I make an attempt to forethink how the Innosocial aspects of entrepreneurship course can be an interesting pattern in the improvement of innovative thinking of students and how it can add an unmissable building block to the entrepreneurial mindset forming courses of our Faculty and the EIT Digital.

Keywords:

Innosocial aspects, entrepreneurial education, innovative thinking, social responsibility, embedded social responsibilty.