“Play to Lead” Board Game as A Potential Intervention to Promote Entrepreneurship Competences and Servant Leadership Skills in European Adolescents

Gaming encourages active learning settings that create interest and motivation, develop the awareness of engagement and improve various skills. There is a dearth of literature on how to nurture young leaders or entrepreneurs. “Play to Lead” is a selfdesigned board game in which students play as a team to win the bridge pieces. The present research sought to explore the beneficial influence of board game participation (i.e., Play to Lead) on entrepreneurship competences and servant leadership among compulsory schooling students in four different European countries (i.e., Denmark, Estonia, Italy and Portugal). A total of 373 adolescents participated in the experimental study and they finished a questionnaire containing the measurements of EntreComp and servant leadership dimensions. The scores of participants in the experimental group before their game participation were compared with their scores after the game participation, and the scores of participants in the control group (without any exposure to the game). Multivaried analyses and binary logistic regression were conducted to verify the hypotheses of the research in the sample and sub-samples divided by country and age. This instructional instrument received overall favorable feedback from participants (both students and teachers) in terms of “game satisfaction” and “game comprehension”. And results revealed that the experimental group, in comparison to the control group, ameliorated in dimensions of servant leadership’s “Forgiveness and Courage”; EntreComp’s “Ideas and Opportunities” as well as “Into Action”, as a function of country and age. Replication in diverse samples of adolescents is required to confirm that the present results are not sample specific. The present study, on the whole, is the first one to demonstrate the possible utility of a board game to promote entrepreneurship competences and servant leadership skills in mandatory schooling adolescents, with implications for education policymakers and curriculum designers.