What If Entrepreneurship Was for All Disciplines? - A Conversation with Ingrid Wakkee

"Towards the end of my teaching and educational career, I think 95% of everything that had to do with education for me was about impact and sustainability, diversity, inclusion," Ingrid reflects. Her journey wasn't sudden - sustainability, transformation, and regeneration "grew into my education over time" - but she was always drawn to impact examples, even when teaching more conventional entrepreneurship. What frustrated Ingrid was resistance to her sustainability focus and the struggle to make colleagues understand that "entrepreneurship is all these things - impact-driven, for all disciplines." So she moved away from traditional examples and Anglo-Saxon textbooks, finding entrepreneurs who weren't just driven by money but by "what can I do?" Teaching in Amsterdam meant being "in Amsterdam and for Amsterdam and of Amsterdam," with field labs and exchanges that rooted learning in place. Ingrid describes higher education as a privilege, approaching students with high expectations: "I assume you can do a lot." She emphasizes that as an educator, being interested in students' stories and wanting to understand their backgrounds matters - "you can still learn everybody's name." Looking toward the future, Ingrid hopes that transformational impact entrepreneurship becomes simply "entrepreneurship" - that we stop teaching extractive and pollutive forms altogether.Key themes: Impact as central (not peripheral), entrepreneurship for all, place-based learning, moving beyond textbook examples, high expectations, making the implicit explicit