Creating Socially Responsible Business Leaders in a Country With High Diversity and Complexity

This paper is based on an exploratory empirical study of an extended field-project undertaken by a private business schools in Jakarta, Indonesia, as part of its curriculum in entrepreneurship education. The project was the sixth one employed by the school, but its benefits and effectiveness had never been evaluated systematically. Thus, the purpose of the study is three-fold; first is to check whether the mission-based goal of the school has been achieved through the project; second is to contribute to the entrepreneurship education literature at the university level where the effectiveness of the education has never been analyzed deeply; and three is to provide a view of how an entrepreneurship education can be approached differently in different environment. The project is an extended one because it is based on a partnership between the school and local community in Cianjur, West Java, an environment rich of agricultural resources, but with low entrepreneurial spirit and minimum government support. Two-hundred-and ninety-seven Undergraduate students took part in the study. They were asked to fill in a survey to find variables of the project considered most beneficial for them; and some open-ended questions to find variables that represent students' best experience in the field-project. Data were analyzed based on a holistic view of living organisms as self-organizing system. Findings showed that: 1) when students were put under extreme tensions, they automatically analyze their own and team members' strengths and weaknesses and work inter-dependently to capitalize their collective talents for releasing tensions and solving problems; 2) teaching students to teach others to be entrepreneurs, can be effective for developing students' confidence to externalize their entrepreneurial capacity; 3) engaging students to work together with business partners in a community that is by far different (inferior) in terms of economic, educational and social backgrounds can be effective for enhancing students' social responsibility, thus for developing social entrepreneurship / leadership.