Reclaiming a Pedagogy for Entrepreneurial Creativity: A Perspective Based on Intellectual Agility and Design-driven Entrepreneurship

Market validation-driven pedagogies, such as Lean Startup and Design Thinking, have become widely popular over the last two decades. By emphasizing hypothesis testing, these approaches risk marginalizing the cultivation of inquiry, imagination, questioning, and reframing entrepreneurial ideas before they are tested. This position paper presents a pedagogical framework to support intellectual agility in iterating between validation and speculation, thereby improving the generation of market hypotheses. We carry out a preliminary review of empirical and conceptual studies in Design-driven Entrepreneurship Education (EE) pedagogy, guided by the criteria of emphasizing early ideation, reflective inquiry, and futures-oriented learning. Building on this literature, we identify five types of transformations (material, conceptual, linguistic, behavioral, and temporal) to support intellectual agility and integrate creative inquiry with market hypotheses validation. Using our framework, we identify and classify methods that can foster creative inquiry in EE. These include reflective prototyping, metaphor-based reframing, futures thinking, constraint-driven storytelling, identity exploration, and anticipatory design. We advocate for constraint as a catalyst for entrepreneurial creativity, challenging EE to move beyond idea testing toward transformative ideation capable of supporting learners’ intellectual agility and their ability to navigate complexity and leveraging ambiguity as a resource.