Integrating EntreComp Through Business Simulation: Positioning the Educator as the Key Pedagogical Anchor

The increasing emphasis on triple bottom line entrepreneurship as a driver for social good highlights the importance of the EntreComp Framework competencies (Bacigalupo et al., 2016). These competences include ethical reasoning, emotional intelligence, empathy, sustainability, stakeholder engagement, and systems thinking (Dodd et al., 2022; Lackéus, 2023; Listyaningsih et al., 2023; Rojas et al., 2024). Despite its structured, process-oriented approach for entrepreneurship curricula, its practical implementation by educators is underutilized and inconsistent due to a lack of guidance for educators on translating abstract competence descriptors into teaching and assessment strategies (McCallum et al., 2018; Seikkula-Leino et al., 2021; Morselli and Orzes, 2023). Experiential learning, especially through simulations, is deemed an effective approach to develop the EntreComp competencies in realistic, uncertain, and interdisciplinary contexts, but research on how simulations can deliver a broad range of these EntreComp competencies or how educator design and pedagogy decisions influence entrepreneurial competency development is limited. Simulation research primarily focuses on the technological features or learner-centred benefits, neglecting an understanding of the educator's role as the primary architect in orchestrating a conducive entrepreneurial experiential learning environment. This study addresses this gap by adopting an educator perspective to examine how educators can intentionally design, orchestrate, design, scaffold, facilitate, and assess simulation-based learning to develop EntreComp competencies.