Social entrepreneurship and complex thinking: an exploratory study with a gender perspective of students at a mexican university

Abstract

According to the international organization Ashoka (2022), social entrepreneurship is an excellent way to address local problems, especially when ideas, proposals, and projects come from the community itself. Thus, more and more universities worldwide are paying attention to the relevance of developing programs or models to trigger social entrepreneurship in their students. They believe this provides conscious training for new professionals and contributes to achieving social responsibility objectives (Alvarez, Melandet, & Núñez, 2021). This article aims to show the results of an exploratory, experimental pilot test of implementing a methodology for the development of the perception of achievement of the competencies of social entrepreneurship and complex thinking. This methodology comprises 9 practical training activities aimed at creating an ideation process and constructing a social entrepreneurship project at a basic level. The activities were designed by a team of social entrepreneurship specialists with pedagogical and instructional design training. Besides the design methodology, we considered the importance of including validated instruments to measure the development of the competencies. We selected the Social Entrepreneur Profile instrument (García-González et al., 2020) to measure social entrepreneurship competency and the E-Complexity instrument (Castillo-Martínez et al., 2021) to measure complex thinking. Specifically, this study analyzes data from female students to identify possible development gaps between genders. Methodologically, a comparison of means before and after the intervention sought to identify statistically significant differences resulting from the implementation. In conclusion, statistically significant differences were identified in both competencies, demonstrating that the methodology impacted the participants regardless of gender; no statistically significant differences were found between men and women. This study is considered limited by its population size, but it invites the possibility of more extensive studies with more comprehensive results. Training in social entrepreneurship aims to develop professionals who can respond to problems in their environments by generating innovative solutions that create value and positively impact society (García-González & Ramírez-Montoya, 2019). According to García-González, Ramírez-Montoya, de León, & Aragón (2020), entrepreneurial training should not only focus on entrepreneurship per se but also on the process of training entrepreneurial skills. On the other hand, the competency of complex thinking is the ability of an individual to visualize problems comprehensively and interconnectedly (i.e., holistically), considering all the elements and actors involved and the dynamics among them (Tobón, 2010). At the formative level, the competency of complex thinking is regarded as one of the so-called general competencies; however, although it is professionally relevant, it is not a competency considered exclusively for a specific discipline or work; it has a transversal impact on students (Drucker, 2021).