Social Entrepreneurship and Sustainability: how can challenge-based learning impact students’ entrepreneurial skills and challenge providers’ problems?

The Department of Economics and Management of the University of Trento offers a master's Course, Sustainability and Social Entrepreneurship, which focuses on hybrid and sustainable companies and aims to transfer the ability to examine opportunities and challenges for promoting corporate and nonprofit/hybrid corporate responsibility and sustainability. The 48-hour Course (8 ECTS) aims to impart knowledge, skills, competencies, approaches, and techniques specific to social impact business design. It also seeks to understand current challenges, trends, and future scenarios in sustainability, innovation, and social entrepreneurship, as well as the main business models available for creating social impact. It is a challenge-based and hands-on course that includes developing a project idea and a social business model to be presented at the end of the Course, starting from challenges launched by the so-called challenge providers in the Trentino territory (such as organizations, cooperatives, and associations). By immersing themselves in the challenges, the students respond to concrete problems, presenting innovative and sustainable solutions at the end of the Course. The purpose of the paper is to understand how an educational initiative such as this Course impacts in two ways: one way is the educational learning, by increasing students' entrepreneurial and innovation skills, and on the other way, how it can have an impact on challenge providers. To evaluate the impact of the challenge from the perspective of students, the research collects data through EntreComp, the European Framework survey concerning entrepreneurial skills. The survey is submitted to students at the beginning and end of the Course. The research also collects data from the reflective tools. To evaluate the impact of the challenges from the perspective of the challenge providers, the research collects data from semi-structured interviews. Preliminary results gathered from the EntreComp and the reflective tools show that students increase their entrepreneurial skills such as, among others, the identification of opportunities, creativity, the capacity to mobilize teammates, problem-solving, and communication skills. From the challenge providers’ perspective, this Course represents an opportunity to acquire new ideas and solutions, recruit young talents, and gain knowledge and competencies.