Abstract:

The Faculty of Informatics at ELTE offers a wide range of entrepreneurial courses on different levels of education that embrace the main questions of social responsibility in the case of innovative ventures. The turbulent global changes in the business environment initialized more visible processes in the field of responsibility from all the organizations and companies, but research cannot say yet if it is a real shift towards more mature corporate responsibility strategies or if responsibility is only part of those marketing tools that can position a firm better in the marketplace.

This shift called to life a new elective course - titled Innosocial aspects of entrepreneurship - that not only aims to form the innovative thinking and entrepreneurial mindset of students but strives to introduce all the potential ways how social impact can be embedded into business strategies as an integral part of them. Since the target group of the course is students, the designer involved them in the further improvement processes of the experimental elective subject and focused on gaining as much feedback from the first few cohorts as possible on how the introduced topics can be more digestible can encourage participants to share their opinions and highlight the double-faced strategies and actions of the innovative companies. Notes from interactive discussions, individual student contributions, focus group analysis and short surveys among the participants provided data on how the questions of positive social impact as a distinctive character in the international competition can be interpreted and what are the potential right questions when it comes to the new innovative ventures and their social responsibility. The conclusions not only enriched the further methodologies of the elective course that strongly focuses on the social impact of innovative tech companies but also nurtured those modules that are integrated into basic entrepreneurship courses. The paper also introduces the attitudes of hundreds of students regarding the social responsibility of innovative companies that were learned through surveys in different cohorts of entrepreneurship courses, independently from the form or length of the courses. The conclusions of the analysis point out how the target groups of the entrepreneurial education react to the questions of social responsibility, what are their interpretations if they have strong critical thinking or believe that positive social impact and profitability are not exclusive in the case of business ventures. The analysis to be introduced in the paper can provide useful methodologies for all those courses that would like to introduce examples in the intersection of social responsibility and competitiveness, based on the experiences of the experimental elective course can guide future educators on how they can pave the path to more responsible thinking of the future business owners or leaders in emerging fields.

Keywords:

Social impact, entrepreneurial education, responsible thinking, business management.