Nurturing “Entrepreneurs” Who Will Build a Sustainable Future

Analyzing the Social Entrepreneurship Process in India

We live in what is called a VUCA era, an age characterized by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. In today’s rapidly changing world, governments alone cannot address all the new social, economic, and environmental challenges that continue to emerge. There is growing recognition of the importance of social entrepreneurship and of people with a social entrepreneurial spirit who can generate innovative solutions to the world’s diverse challenges and scale them across communities and society at large.

A social entrepreneur is someone who (1) pursues a social mission, (2) employs innovative technology or methods, and (3) operates and sustains their work as a business. Points (2) and (3) overlap with conventional entrepreneurs, but the key distinction is (1): social impact is the primary goal. Social entrepreneurship therefore demands a careful balance between pursuing social impact and maintaining financial self-sustainability through business revenue. Also essential is an innovative element: the capacity to generate new value and new approaches.

For about ten years, I have been researching case studies of how social entrepreneurs address fundamental social challenges in India, including in education and sanitation. One example I examined is an initiative that aims to bridge language gaps in education delivery.

India has two official languages (Hindi and English) and 22 scheduled languages, with one of those 22 used as the medium of instruction in each state’s schools. Beyond these, however, the country has hundreds of regional languages and dialects, meaning that in some areas children must attend classes taught in a language different from the one they speak at home with family and friends. Public school teachers are typically reassigned every few years, making it difficult for them to acquire languages outside the scheduled list, and the language gap is beyond what teachers alone can bridge. As a result, children who fall behind when lessons proceed in a language they cannot follow lose interest in learning and eventually drop out of school.

To address this problem, local NPOs and volunteer networks hire bilingual individuals to bridge children’s language gaps and have built a business around selling the teaching materials, know-how, and training services they developed in the process. Rather than simply providing word-for-word interpretation, this initiative also works with education specialists to culturally adapt and contextually translate textbook language to suit the local environment, and has succeeded in delivering better education to children. Analyzing social business cases like this one has deepened my understanding of how human networks can generate broader and more substantial social impact.

Spotlight on University-Originated Deep Tech Startups

Since last year, I have also been engaged in research on entrepreneurship and startup ecosystems in Japan.

In recent years, the Japanese government has increasingly emphasized cultivating startups as engines of economic growth and innovation. Since 2022, the government has implemented a range of support measures under the Startup Development Five-year Plan, and the number of startups in Japan has been rising.

Compared with other countries, however, Japan’s startup sector continues to underperform. My research involves interviewing startup founders, support organizations, investors, universities, and others to assess the effectiveness of government policies and ecosystem-building efforts and identify the support most conducive to startup growth.

One study currently underway as part of this research focuses on university-originated deep tech startups. Advanced technologies such as AI, space development, regenerative medicine, and quantum computing can generate significant global social impact, and there is strong hope for university-born startups, which are at the center of this research. At the same time, despite their excellent research and cutting-edge technology, Japanese universities frequently struggle to commercialize their research ideas. Through this research, I aim to identify the bottlenecks to commercialization in university-originated startups and find better ways for universities, venture funds, government policies, and industry-academia collaboration to support the translation of scientific discoveries into socially impactful businesses.

One Pack of Sticky Notes: What New Value Can You Create?

Among the factors behind Japan’s sluggish startup numbers is a social environment in which fear of failure makes it hard to take risks, combined with a lack of entrepreneurship education in high schools and universities. In my own courses, I aim to broaden students’ career options and entrepreneurial outlook by presenting role models and concrete examples of entrepreneurs and sharing practical knowledge.

In my Innovation & Entrepreneurship and Social Entrepreneurship courses, for example, I use case-based teaching methods and have students develop and carry out projects so that they can learn entrepreneurial thinking and knowledge firsthand.

The projects in my courses are designed for students to work in teams and learn from experience: how to generate new value from limited resources, how to execute plans while taking risks, and how to build a team. Among the many projects we have done, one that stands out in my memory was a team’s idea in what I call the Sticky Note Project. The prompt was to use a single pack of sticky notes to do something valuable within one week, with the students themselves defining “value.” The team went to a park on a day off, approached strangers, and asked each person to write a short sentence on a sticky note. They then showed the first person’s sentence to someone else, handed them a sticky note, and asked them to write the next part of the story. Repeating this with a dozen or so people, they ultimately completed an entertaining story. It was a wonderfully creative initiative that, using only sticky notes, brought together strangers in the park and created a new human connection—a genuine social value.

This year, ten students from our faculty were selected for the Millennium Fellowship 2026, a leadership development program run by UN Academic Impact and the Millennium Campus Network. I will be serving as one of the faculty advisors, supporting and mentoring their activities.

The program brings together 5,500 students from 330 campuses across 60 countries, who form an online network while each planning and implementing a project with social impact toward achieving the SDGs. Our students plan to develop a project in the Totsuka area, where our Yokohama Campus is located, focused on creating welcoming spaces for children. I hope the experience of implementing a project and exchanging ideas with students from around the world gives them fresh inspiration and strengthens their capacity to take on social challenges.

Expanding Entrepreneurship Education Across All Fields

When it comes to entrepreneurship education at universities, I think that if every faculty—whether in the sciences or humanities—offered opportunities to learn about entrepreneurship, Japan’s startup sector would grow considerably.

At the heart of every startup lies excellent research or a new technology. Yet in my surveys of people in the startup world, I often hear researchers say they wanted to use their findings to start a company but gave up because they couldn’t find a partner with a business mindset. If outstanding researchers could team up with people who have studied entrepreneurship and business thinking, the chances of a startup succeeding would surely rise. Within universities, if each faculty offered its own form of entrepreneurship education, students’ mindsets could shift and the paths open to them could expand. For example, the Faculty of International Studies could teach know-how for launching ventures with a multinational team, and the Faculty of Mathematical Informatics could encourage students to consider how the technologies they research could be commercialized.

Going forward, I hope to do my part through research to advance the spread of social entrepreneurship and help build a society in which innovation contributes not only to economic goals but also to the pursuit of social and environmental value. Through education, I also want to help shift how people perceive entrepreneurship, particularly how they approach risk-taking, starting new ventures, and learning from failure. That said, I can only provide students with that mindset through such projects; going beyond that is up to them. There is no single answer to any social problem. My hope is that students will combine their skills and experiences with what they learn at university, engage in open discussion with many different people about social challenges, and think things through together.