From Empathy to Impact: Examining Opportunity Recognition for Impactful, Socially Relevant Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Entrepreneurship education (EE) aims to develop students’ ability to identify, evaluate and act on opportunities, yet opportunity identification receives little structured attention. It is shaped by prior knowledge, experience and networks, which can limit students to familiar markets and problems. This creates an innovation blind spot in unfamiliar or underserved domains such as ageing, disability or accessibility, where socially relevant entrepreneurship is needed but user knowledge is less accessible. Empathy-based methods, such as empathic interviewing, perspective-taking, observation and immersion, offer a promising path but remain under-researched in entrepreneurship education. This working paper presents a PhD project that conceptualises entrepreneurial empathy as a teachable capability: an epistemic bridge through which students access, interpret and translate deeper user knowledge into higher-quality opportunities. Opportunity quality is multidimensional, spanning problem depth, user alignment, innovativeness, social relevance and impact potential. The research asks to what extent empathy-based methods enable students to identify higher-quality opportunities grounded in deeper understanding of user needs. It comprises four studies: a cross-disciplinary typology of empathy-based methods; an AI-supported scaffold for empathic interviewing; a randomised comparison of trained and conventional interviewing; and a study of physical immersion. Together they combine conceptual development, educational design and empirical evaluation to strengthen inclusive, socially relevant entrepreneurship education.