Engineering skills and Sustainable Entrepreneurship : An exploratory study in the Swedish Master's  Level

Abstract: Introduction- Human activities has resulted in degradation of quality of environment, social life, and economic gains, bringing to life the challenges of sustainability. In order to reduce degradations, a solution encircling sustainability is required. The solution must bring economic viability, social equity, and environmental protection. One of the many solutions can be creation of sustainable enterprises, also the concept of sustainable entrepreneurship is catching the pace worldwide. But who can attain sustainable entrepreneurship is still a question Engineers can connect technology to the market and can create products which are sustainable (Alexa et al., 2020) seems to be right choice. Hence educating engineers can be effective to achieve sustainable entrepreneurship. Purpose and research question- Sustainable entrepreneurship is a relatively nascent field. Even though, engineers seem to be right choice to train, there is not sufficient information on the literature regarding the skills necessary to promote sustainable entrepreneurship. Besides, the universities are not aware of the methods that helps in developing these skills. Even though many authors focus on sustainable entrepreneurship, it is not quite explained in terms of engineering. This gap needs to be bridged by determining relevant engineering skills that promote sustainable entrepreneurship in future engineering students and discover few teaching methods and learning approaches that facilitate in developing these skills and thus answer the research question “What engineering skills are important to promote sustainable entrepreneurship in master education and what methods facilitate the developing of these skills” Methodology- In order to answer the research question, a qualitative study was carried out with a deductive approach. Also, the nature of the research is exploratory. In addition to this, interviews were conducted with program directors from four Swedish universities to gain deeper understandings from their perspectives regarding the engineering skills required to promote sustainable entrepreneurship and the methods to facilitate its development. Findings- From the insights of the participants it is found that many skills are interrelated to each other; meaning, development of one skill results in improvement of another. Also, many teaching and learning methods were found out from the interviews that facilitate in the development of these skills. Besides, it was found that the participants did not consider the development of all the skills identified in the literature in accordance with their program. But majority of these skills were considered to be relevant to promote sustainable entrepreneurship. Conclusions- It is seen that engineering skills from multiple disciplines seems to coincide especially when sustainability is a common goal. It is evident from the literature, primary and the secondary data that these skills are important to be developed in engineering students in the perspective of sustainable entrepreneurship. Also, this study has many implications for program directors, future researches, teaching professionals and master’s students as well