Building the entrepreneurship of tomorrow:

learning to adapt, anticipate and innovate.

At a time of accelerating technological, ecological, and societal transformations, entrepreneurship is reinventing itself within increasingly interconnected, volatile, and multi-sectoral ecosystems. Recent work highlights the growing importance of foresight, adaptive learning, and responsible innovation in managing uncertainty for entrepreneurs, particularly young entrepreneurs and student entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurial ecosystems play a key role in this process, fostering interactions, mobilizing resources, and enabling the emergence of new, more collaborative and inclusive forms of governance (Roundy and Bayer, 2022; Guerrero and Urbano, 2023).

These dynamics are particularly evident in the emergence of new entrepreneurial communities (student entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, regional collectives, digital communities), as well as in the adoption of approaches focused on impact, sustainability, and resilience. Research shows that learning from failures, vulnerabilities, and periods of entrepreneurial abandonment is essential for developing future skills (Shepherd, Saade, and Wincent, 2023). More recent work even shows that failure—whether financial, psychological, or related to systemic constraints—becomes a structuring learning process that allows entrepreneurs to develop their reflexivity, strategic prudence, creativity, and sensitivity to ethical issues (Jenkins, Wiklund, and Brundin, 2022; Singh and Corner, 2024). This resilience is strategic in a context marked by social, health, and environmental crises.

At the same time, major technological advances, such as artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, the energy transition, and frugal innovations, are redefining the logic of innovation within organizations and prompting a rethinking of entrepreneurial models (Shneor and Zhao, 2024; Nambisan, Wright, and Feldman, 2023). Entrepreneurship thus emerges as a key player in ecological, territorial, and societal transitions, contributing to new modes of production, consumption, and governance (Krzakiewicz and Cyfert, 2022).
This section therefore invites submissions exploring new forms of entrepreneurship capable of shaping the future, such as social entrepreneurship, the social and solidarity economy, responsible innovation, governance and resilience, the future of entrepreneurial ecosystems, innovative entrepreneurial teaching methods, the role of younger generations in transformation, and trajectories of failure, abandonment, or entrepreneurial vulnerability as opportunities for learning and reinvention. Empirical, conceptual, or prospective work that helps us envision a form of entrepreneurship capable of learning, anticipating, and innovating in the face of tomorrow's challenges is particularly welcome.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship of the future, Strategic foresight, Responsible innovation, Entrepreneurial resilience and failure, Learning ecosystems

Track chairs:

Manel Toumi, Isabelle Liotard et Benoît Desmarchelier (Université Sorbonne Paris 13) 

(manel.toumi@univ-paris13.fr)