Entrepreneurial Thinking in an Uncertain World

• While entrepreneurship education traditionally teaches students to recognize opportunities and take risks, it also should show them how to act resourcefully and collaboratively when established routes no longer work.
• Research on female refugee entrepreneurs illustrates how they create economic value despite lacking advantages such as financing, supportive regulation, and professional networks.
• Because entrepreneurial thinking will be essential for most future jobs, schools should offer entrepreneurship courses to students across the university, co-designing context-specific modules with other faculty.

 
Artificial intelligence, geopolitical instability, climate change, demographic shifts, new employment relationships, and the changing higher education landscape are reshaping the world of work. Against this backdrop, universities face a familiar question with renewed urgency: What capabilities will graduates need when neither jobs nor careers develop predictably?

While entrepreneurial thinking generally is offered as part of the answer, too often entrepreneurship education focuses on spotting opportunities, innovating, taking risks, starting ventures, and scaling successful businesses. While these capabilities are important, collectively they can reproduce the stereotypical image of the heroic entrepreneur, often imagined as a man who identifies an opportunity and assembles resources to exploit it.

My research has led me to take a much broader view of entrepreneurial thinking, one that emerges far from the environments traditionally celebrated in entrepreneurship education. I have seen how entrepreneurship can flourish under constraints when approached with resourcefulness, agency, and inclusion. And I believe business schools should work across disciplinary boundaries to teach students in any field how to act resourcefully, collaboratively, and responsibly when established routes no longer work.

A Brief Background

I draw these conclusions largely from my research with women who are refugee entrepreneurs in Lebanon and Jordan, as well as other women entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia. Despite having restricted opportunities and operating without conditions that conventional models take for granted, these women employ entrepreneurial thinking to exercise agency and create economic and social value.

Displaced Palestinian and Syrian refugee women in Jordan and Lebanon, for example, generally lack financing, formal employment, supportive regulation, professional networks, mobility, or straightforward legal routes to establishing businesses. Yet they generate economic value by mobilizing family and community relationships, combining resources in unconventional ways, developing informal mechanisms for exchange, acquiring new skills, and adapting existing ones. In these settings, entrepreneurship is as much an exercise in resourcefulness and adaptation as it is an act of opportunity recognition.

However, we must not romanticize hardship. It is too easy to turn structural disadvantage into an inspirational story of individual resilience, implying that others should overcome the same barriers through greater effort. The evidence is more complex than that. Entrepreneurship can strengthen income, confidence, decision-making power, and economic participation while leaving gender inequality, displacement, poverty, exclusion, and restrictive institutions intact.

Agency matters, but context determines how far agency can travel. This insight can enrich how universities teach entrepreneurial thinking.

The Essential Skill of Resourcefulness

Historically, entrepreneurship education has devoted considerable attention to opportunity recognition, showing students how to identify unmet needs, evaluate markets, and turn ideas into viable ventures. However, in an uncertain world of work, a new question arises: How can entrepreneurs exhibit resourcefulness when the opportunities they need are not readily available?

Resourcefulness means working creatively with what is accessible rather than waiting for ideal conditions. It can involve recombining knowledge and materials, drawing on relationships, experimenting, adapting quickly, and finding alternative pathways around constraints. Such capabilities matter to founders, but they also matter to graduates entering established organizations characterized by technological change, restructuring, and cross-sector collaboration. In addition, these capabilities will be useful to graduates as they pursue project-based careers and navigate shifting professional identities.

Students should understand that an individual’s degree of agency is shaped by gender, class, ethnicity, migration status, geography, disability, financial status, education, and networks.

Resourcefulness also will be essential as AI reshapes the workplace. While technical knowledge will remain important, its market value can change quickly. Therefore, both students and graduates need to ask: What can we do with the knowledge, relationships, and technology available to us? Which assumptions prevent us from seeing another solution? Who needs to be involved? How can we act before we have complete information? Entrepreneurial thinking helps them build a capacity for purposeful action during times of uncertainty.

But there is a danger in expecting students and graduates to simply become more entrepreneurial, adaptable, and resilient when conditions are challenging. Doing so shifts responsibility for social and economic change from institutions to individuals. In this scenario, job insecurity becomes the individual’s failure to adapt, skills obsolescence becomes a failure to learn, and unemployment becomes a failure to recognize opportunity.

These conclusions are neither analytically convincing nor socially responsible. Indeed, students should understand that an individual’s degree of agency is shaped by gender, class, ethnicity, migration status, geography, disability, financial status, education, and networks. Additionally, workplaces and institutions distribute opportunity and risk unevenly, further limiting how much control people have over their own choices.

Accessible and Inclusive

For these reasons, business schools have a responsibility to take a broad, inclusive approach to entrepreneurship education. The challenge is not simply to widen access to entrepreneurship education, but to make it genuinely inclusive.

Rosanna Garcia and co-authors argue that entrepreneurship scholarship must recognize heterogeneity within entrepreneur populations. They distinguish between assimilation (in which people are allowed to belong only when they conform to a dominant norm) and genuine inclusion (which combines belonging with recognition of people’s unique identities and circumstances).

Instead of presenting one dominant type of entrepreneurship, business schools should show students multiple possibilities: commercial and social, individual and collective, formal and informal, high-growth and livelihood-sustaining, opportunity-led and necessity-driven.

Such an approach changes whose experience counts as entrepreneurial knowledge. For example, a refugee woman who creates a home-based enterprise with minimal capital may not describe herself as an entrepreneur, and her venture may not scale or attract investment. Yet the way she mobilizes resources, negotiates family responsibilities, develops customers, manages uncertainty, and creates value can reveal entrepreneurial thinking capabilities that mainstream entrepreneurship education overlooks.

Beyond the Business School

There’s another reason business schools should broaden their offerings on entrepreneurial thinking: It’s a capability that is much too important to be taught solely to business students. Engineers need it to translate technical ideas into usable solutions; scientists need it to move discoveries toward economic or societal value; and healthcare professionals need it to innovate within ethical, resource, and institutional constraints.

Additionally, designers use entrepreneurial thinking as they experiment and iterate ideas. Professionals in the humanities and social sciences fields increasingly use entrepreneurial concepts as they construct careers across organizations, projects, sectors, and forms of employment.

Business schools should broaden their offerings on entrepreneurial thinking because it’s a capability that is much too important to be taught solely to business students.

Most of these individuals might not start businesses, but entrepreneurial thinking is still valuable to them. It helps them develop the ability to frame problems, act under uncertainty, gather resources, draw on relationships, test ideas, learn from feedback, and understand who benefits or bears the risk when a solution is introduced.

To democratize entrepreneurial thinking, business schools can work with other faculties to co-design modules and connect students with public agencies and social ventures. Classroom assignments should make the disciplinary context visible. For example, instead of completing generic business plan exercises, nursing students should address healthcare problems; engineering students should solve challenges designed around safety, sustainability, and public value.

Three Educational Adjustments

If business schools are to take a much wider view of entrepreneurship, they must do more than add new electives. They must teach the conditions as well as the techniques that shape entrepreneurship. I would suggest beginning with three shifts:

Design learning around meaningful constraints. Give students a community or organizational problem and require them to solve it with limited time, financing, data, or authority. Encourage them to draw on existing relationships and overlooked resources that might create alternative pathways. Their objective is not to produce the ideal solution, but to identify what they can accomplish under conditions that limit possible responses.

Use diverse examples and co-created challenges. Treat difference as a source of knowledge by highlighting not just high-growth founders but also collective, refugee, intrapreneurial, community, and public-sector entrepreneurs. For example, have students compare the process of a well-resourced technology founder with that of a refugee woman who generates economic value by drawing on relationships, adapting skills, and combining available resources.

Ask students to identify the entrepreneurial capabilities evident in both cases, as well as the very different conditions within which those capabilities can be exercised. Be certain not to celebrate the refugee entrepreneur for overcoming disadvantage, but to explore what her experience reveals about resourcefulness, agency, and the structural conditions that determine how far that agency can travel.

Assess responsibility as well as action. When discussing any innovation, require students to look closely at who benefits. Such an exercise could form the second stage of a conventional pitch exercise. Students would first outline a challenge, their proposed solution, and the required resources. Then they would identify who gains from their solution, who assumes new costs or risks, whose knowledge informed its design, and who might remain unable to participate.

For example, a digital platform designed to expand flexible employment for a population of workers might create opportunities for them while simultaneously exposing them to new risks such as income insecurity or increased training costs. By looking at how various groups are affected, students learn to evaluate entrepreneurial action not only according to its feasibility, but also according to the conditions it creates or reproduces for others.

Students are asked to propose a solution to a challenge and then identify who gains, who assumes new risks, and who might remain unable to participate.

With these three shifts, entrepreneurship education goes beyond teaching students how to launch businesses and moves toward helping them develop critical thinking and capability.

These shifts also emphasize that mentoring and experiential learning are relational activities. This idea is explored in research I have conducted with Rhea George and Bshaar Alabdelmuhsin. Our work shows that learning is not simply a transmission of expertise from expert to novice, but an exchange between mentors and mentees that can build identity, confidence, networks, and agency for both groups.

The work was undertaken at the Prince Mohammed bin Salman College of Business and Entrepreneurship in collaboration with Saudi Arabia’s Alnahda Society, and it is sponsored by the Babson Global Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership. It has informed the design of a Triadic Mentoring model that can be adopted by corporations, public sector organizations, and universities to support the entrepreneurial development of employees and students.

Creating and Assessing Possibilities

There is no doubt that universities must prepare students for a workplace shaped by AI, digital transformation, sustainability issues, and new organizational forms. But since we cannot predict every skill the future will demand, we need to develop graduates’ capacity to create possibilities when established routes fail.

We can accomplish this by expanding the meaning of entrepreneurial thinking to include opportunity recognition and resourcefulness, innovation and adaptation, individual agency and structural awareness, economic value creation, and attention to who benefits from an entrepreneurial activity and who remains excluded. The entrepreneurs I have worked with demonstrate remarkable agency in extraordinarily constrained circumstances.

The lesson I have learned is that every graduate should be able to simultaneously create possibilities within the world as it exists and question the conditions that determine who will benefit the most. This is the entrepreneurial thinking that an uncertain world of work requires.