The Business Project: Teaching Business Ethics Through Student Entrepreneurship

Peter Jaworski; Justin Tosi; Sahar Akhtar

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The Business Project: Teaching Business Ethics Through Student Entrepreneurship

Peter Jaworski, Justin Tosi, and Sahar Akhtar

McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University

Volume 23: 2026 pp. 00-00: ABSTRACT

Traditional case studies in business ethics ask students to evaluate others’ decisions with hindsight and moral distance. The Business Project reverses this dynamic by requiring students to build companies they genuinely care about, make public commitments they must defend, and navigate ethical dilemmas emerging from their own choices. Over a semester, student teams pitch businesses grounded in ethical values, critique competitors’ moral failures, and respond to custom dilemmas that force difficult trade-offs between principles and viability. The assignment integrates entrepreneurial action with ethical reflection, making moral reasoning routine rather than exceptional. By eliminating the comfortable distance of hypothetical scenarios, the project creates learning conditions closer to actual ethical decision-making: competing pressures, personal investment, and skeptical audiences demanding justification. This experiential approach trains students to identify moral problems before they become crises and to integrate ethical principles into strategic planning.

Keywords: entrepreneurship, experiential learning, case method alternatives, pedagogical methods