CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Leadership in Education
Contextualizing Entrepreneurial Leadership in the K-12 school setting – lessons from Austria and Germany
Provisionally accepted
- 1Pädagogische Hochschule Burgenland, Eisenstadt, Austria
- 2Europa-Universitat Flensburg, Flensburg, Germany
- 3Universitat Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt am Wörthersee, Austria
- 4Anoikto Panepistemio Kyprou, Latsia, Cyprus
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Global megatrends such as climate change, demographic shifts, and technological disruption increasingly compel K–12 school leaders to innovate within complex and uncertain environments. Entrepreneurial School Leadership (ESL), encompassing opportunity recognition, initiative, and strategic resource management in a bureaucratic setting, offers a framework for adaptive and future-oriented K-12 leadership. This conceptual paper examines ESL in German-speaking countries, where educational traditions that prioritize humanistic Bildung over market-oriented models, interact with pressures for efficiency and accountability. A document analysis of normative school leadership profiles from Austria and Germany highlights the formal integration of entrepreneurial content knowledge and competencies, including innovation, networking, and strategic planning, while revealing persistent tensions between pedagogical and economic rationalities. The analysis underscores that ESL operates at the intersection of individual dispositions, institutional conditions, and national-cultural contexts. Future research should investigate how ESL is enacted in practice, including its potential for fostering social value, transformative innovation, and sustainable school development, while critically attending to unintended consequences and context-specific constraints.
Keywords: Educational Leadership, Entrepreneurial School Leadership, context, Entrepreneurship, innovation
Received: 22 Jul 2025; Accepted: 18 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Frentz, Frenz, Brauckmann-Sajkiewicz and Pashiardis. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Stefan Brauckmann-Sajkiewicz, stefan.brauckmann@aau.at
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