Educating for the development of sustainable business models: Designing and delivering a course to foster creativity

Incorporating entrepreneurship and sustainability as complementary entities is challenging. Within a multi-disciplinary academic context and using a case-study research approach, this paper outlines the design and delivery of an entrepreneurship course to encourage participants' lateral thinking and incorporated intelligence when developing sustainable business models. Results underline the fact that teams, which include participants with a greater diversity of academic backgrounds, tend to think and act more creatively in the conceptualization of new business models compared to less diverse teams in a similar academic context. Participants’ ideas in diverse teams proved to incorporate a wider problem context in their problem-solution proposition. This underlines some conclusive evidence for a positive relationship between social learning and business development in fostering first and foremost intangible learning but also enable concrete tangible outcomes in creating new sustainability business models.