How to support students in recognising commons-based entrepreneurial opportunities - collaboration, systems thinking and an inter-disciplinary approach to seeing beyond profits.

Sustainable entrepreneurship does not automatically lead to societal progress or better quality of life. In fact, entrepreneurial ventures may aggravate sustainability problems through increased consumption. Regardless, entrepreneurship has great potential towards transforming. Enterprise education plays an important role in laying the foundation for competence development for transformative entrepreneurship. In order to bring about change at a systemic level, enterprising students not only require systems thinking skills to recognise gaps and levers for change but also open collaborative skills which enables them to interact with and learn from peers and stakeholders in a multidisciplinary environment. An approach increasingly adopted by entrepreneurs to de-aggravate sustainability challenges is the creation of commons, i.e. shared resources that are accessible, inclusive and democratically managed by and for communities. While this partially removes resources from market mechanisms and the value of products and services is based on their use and not their value of exchange, entrepreneurs cannot do away with revenue generating activities. One of the key tensions linked to sustainable entrepreneurship is balancing purpose and monetization. Therefore, it is important for enterprise education to equip students with the competencies they need for improving the income, health and well-being of communities in an equitable way without a significant negative spillover elsewhere because of revenue generating activities.