Registration ends 07.4.2026 at 23:59 h

If your registration for this course is successful you will registered automatically for the course Perspectives on Entrepreneurship - V/Ü (Michael Gielnik, Elke Schüßler).

Can entrepreneurship thrive without endless growth? This course challenges conventional assumptions about innovation, technology, and success in the digital age. As the limits of our planet increasingly collide with the imperatives of growth, we turn to degrowth, an emerging framework that prioritizes ecological sustainability, social justice, and human wellbeing over profit and optimization, and ask what it means to design digital technology from this starting point.

Students will critically examine the environmental and social contradictions of digitalization, while exploring concrete alternatives: convivial technologies, platform cooperatives, digital commons, and social justice approaches to innovation. Through lectures, discussions, and hands-on workshops, we develop both the critical vocabulary and the practical tools to reimagine digital technologies that operate within ecological limits and create genuine social value.

Alongside the theoretical work, students will move through a guided redesign process across the course. Working in small teams, you will select an existing digital technology, assess it against the values and frameworks introduced in the course, and produce a redesign proposal grounded in one of four design orientations: digital commons, platform cooperativism, digital degrowth, or design justice. The goal is not a market-ready product but a critically grounded proposal — one that asks what entrepreneurial success could look like when growth and profit is no longer the measure of it.

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

Know and understand:
(1) Define key concepts from the frameworks of the course.
(2) Describe the environmental and social contradictions embedded in contemporary digital technologies and the systems that produce them.
(3) Summarize the foundational arguments of the theoretical frameworks presented in the course.

Reflect and analyze:
(4) Distinguish between mainstream and alternative approaches to digital design and entrepreneurship, identifying the assumptions about growth and progress underlying each.
(5) Apply theoretical frameworks and design methodologies to concrete cases and technologies.
(6) Assess a digital technology against a shared set of values-based evaluation criteria, identifying who it serves, who it excludes, and what social and ecological harms it produces or reproduces.

Act and create:
(7) Critically evaluate design decisions in terms of social and ecological values rather than market logic or optimization.
(8) Synthesize insights from multiple course frameworks to develop a coherent and values-grounded redesign proposal for an existing digital technology.
(9) Collaboratively produce a redesign proposal that demonstrates an understanding of sufficiency, collective ownership, and care as design principles
(10) Construct and deliver a peer feedback process that embodies the collaborative and reflective values of the course.

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