Integrated Pedagogy for Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Innovation: The Case of EIT Climate KIC

There is to date rather little research on the pedagogy of sustainable entrepreneurship and innovation education. This study illustrates the value of an integrated pedagogical approach to sustainable entrepreneurship and innovation education: one that acknowledges all three dimensions of head (abstract knowledge), hands (practical competence), and heart (affect and motivation). It also illustrates the challenges of doing so. To these ends, the study applies a simple, integrated approach to transformational learning to the exemplar case of summer school training offered by the European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT) Climate KIC education programme, a European Commission-funded initiative to develop sustainability-oriented entrepreneurs. The study uses repertory grid-based interviews to understand and compare the perspectives of a sample of participants, with a view to providing in depth, mostly qualitative insights. We find that, as proposed a priori, all three educational elements (head, hands and heart) are viewed as valuable by participants, about half of whom had already established an entrepreneurial venture or intended to in the next five years. However, we also find that the often-neglected Heart dimension of learning seems to have had the greatest impact on the participants.