Decolonial Entrepreneurship Education: Innovative Pedagogies and Contradictions From a Latin American Case Study

Abstract

Entrepreneurship education (EE) in Latin America is largely delivered through Global North pedagogical models that privilege individual agency and abstract venture logics, with limited fit for other region’s cultural and socio-ecological complexity. This study asks how decolonial pedagogical commitments are built into the design and enactment of a community-engaged entrepreneurship course, and what epistemic, institutional, and material contradictions emerge when these commitments are enacted in practice. Drawing on a qualitative case study of the Idea to Start-up: Climate Action course at TU Delft, implemented with community partners in Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands, the analysis triangulates course materials, student reflections, instructor observations, student deliverables, and community feedback. The Andean cosmovision Sumak Kawsay served as the normative and ethical compass of the course design, enacted through three pedagogical mechanisms: immersion and co-creation, embodied and reflective practices, and role fluidity with a partial redistribution of pedagogical authority. These mechanisms reframed entrepreneurial competences as situated, relational, and embodied performances, fostering emerging manifestations of cultural humility, ethical reflexivity, and contextual opportunity recognition, while academic calendars, language and genre conventions, and growth-oriented imaginaries kept the translation partial and contested. The paper contributes an account of decolonial EE as an imperfect, situated practice of pedagogical translation.