Registration ends 07.4.2026 at 23:59 h

As the world faces growing grand challenges, such as climate change, resource scarcity, armed conflicts and many more, one approach to tackle these challenges may be “active citizenship“. The idea is that every citizen makes use of his or her skills and put them to work in a meaningful way to explore new ways of addressing social problems. If these citizen activists organize themselves in a business-like structure to achieve a certain goal, we speak of "citizen entrepreneurship". Using tools as online networking, private-public partnerships, corporate engagement or social entrepreneurship, these entrepreneurs strive for sustainable, systemic solutions in their community. Rather than short-term fixes and hand-me-down charity, they aim to build empowering communities and impactful organizations rather than fostering dependency.

In this course, you learn about citizen entrepreneurship with guest lectures, by using examples, discussing case studies, and performing a (practical) assignment: You can either find out how much citizen entrepreneurship lies within you and your ecosystem by looking at a citizen initiative you are involved in already, or you explore an existing "external" citizen entrepreneurship initiative and its ecosystem in-depth to enrich the research field. How much potential does citizen entrepreneurship have for solving grand challenges? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the concept? Together we will find out.

Citizen Entrepreneurship encompasses citizens' inclusion, integration, and engagement in the entrepreneurial process. As a conceptual framework, it represents a comprehensive view of how individuals within a community or society participate in entrepreneurship beyond the traditional profit-driven model. Citizen entrepreneurs create economic and social value by addressing local problems (e.g., in a city), often resulting from unsustainable development. The concept includes elements of, e.g., social or sustainable entrepreneurship, but it is not yet widely researched and represented in the literature.

Students gain understanding of and learn to explain and reflect on the concept of Citizen Entrepreneurship, distinguish it from related approaches, and situate it within broader societal transformation processes. They learn to critically analyze, evaluate, and discuss cases of Citizen Entrepreneurship.

Further information on teaching evaluation: https://www.leuphana.de/en/teaching/quality-management/evaluation/course-evaluation.html