Developing entrepreneurship through Design Thinking: a new frontier for adult education

This essay revolves around the construct of entrepreneurship (Moberg et al., 2014) as a key category to generate value at economic, cultural and social levels. Through a terminological survey, designed to bring order to the vast galaxy of definitions (Erkkilä, 2000; QAA, 2012), we shall will take a closer look at the dimension of entrepreneurship education (Lackéus, 2015) in its links with the educational process at university level. In this framework, the Design Thinking method (Dunne & Martin, 2006) fits as a common approach in the international arena for the construction of programmes targeting entrepreneurship. If many experiences currently follow a positioning that is mostly extra-curricular, future prospects are directed towards an ‘embedded’ setting capable of making teachers the central nucleus for skills development (European Commission, 2014; Lackéus, 2015).