Educational and business co-operatives: the channels for collective creativity and entrepreneurial teams

It is increasingly common to establish co-operatives not only for business purposes but also for the purpose of teaching collaboration practices in business. This chapter investigates and compares traditional business co-operatives and educational co-operatives as the environments of entrepreneurial learning communities. The data, which consists of interviews with members of both types of co-operatives, have been analyzed through a content analysis. The main outcomes show that in both types of co-operatives, a sense of community and creativity are manifested as parts of the learning process. When examining the development of collective creativity and if the learning processes were manifested as single- and double-loop learning, some differences were observed between educational co-operatives and business co-operatives.