Sustainability is often not emphasized enough in business courses for students to learn how to solve business problems with an ecological mindset. As such, entrepreneurial courses need the appropriate frameworks and teaching methodologies to enable students to understand what being sustainable means and how to embed it in their decision-making. By studying examples of how professors teach sustainability in Babson College’s Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship (FME) course, this project hopes to synthesize and suggest ways for professors to better engage students in learning about social and environmental sustainability and applying those concepts. This study considers how sustainability can be successfully embedded into a disciplined-based course, rather than a short-term course or program. It considers both professors' and students' perspective. 

The results are based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of interviews and surveys with 14 professors and 11 sections of students during the Fall 2024 semester of the first-year entrepreneurial course (where teams of students develop and propose business ideas and the three most-voted-on ideas in each section are launched as real businesses in the Spring semester). More than 200 student survey responses were collected in the beginning and end of the semester. In addition to these, an analysis of the business ideas developed by all 18 sections of students during the first semester was conducted to understand how students incorporated ideas of social and environmental sustainability. 

FME Professors who 1) emphasize sustainability throughout the semester, 2) provide strong value propositions of why students should care about sustainability and 3) effectively implement diverse methods of teaching sustainability, will result in students caring more about it and implementing such ideas into their ventures. Their teaching methods should be applied for other FME courses to more effectively engage students in learning about social and environmental sustainability.