Chryssi Tzanetou, John Tull, and Xyrone Ishwar
What happens when you take business school students inside a UK male prison to co-design entrepreneurship training with young inmates? BA(Hons) Entrepreneurship third year student Xyrone Ishwar, together with, for part of the time, BA (Hons) Business Management third year student Hermes Malaveci, joined the Greenwich Business School BOS academic team’s ‘Creative U’ project in HMP ISIS to help co-design creative entrepreneurship education with young inmates aged 18-25.
Fuelled by our student-driven moto “people to people”, our Creative U pilot project attempted to find out how can people inspire people to reach their full potential through entrepreneurship, revealing something remarkable through the process: confined spaces can become potential spaces where meaningful relationships form to recover a sense of trust and self-belief.
Breaking Down Conceptual and Affective Walls
The UK statistics are compelling. Research from the Centre for Entrepreneurs (2016) shows 79% of inmates are interested in starting a business – that’s nearly double the general UK population at 40%. Yet fewer than one in five people find employment six weeks after leaving prison, while UK prisons run at near-100% capacity.
The economist William Baumol (Baumol, 1990) suggests that criminals and entrepreneurs share remarkably similar traits: independence, resourcefulness, alertness to opportunities, and opposition to convention. The difference lies not in character but in circumstances that channel these traits towards productive or destructive ends; and in building trust relations to remove barriers.
This sparked our central question: what if we could harness this entrepreneurial potential through authentic co-creation, treating young men in prison as active partners rather than passive recipients?
The Creative U Methodology: Blending entrepreneurship education with design thinking and applied theatre
With support from NUSC in 2025, we brought together the University of Greenwich Business School, HMP Isis, charity Untold, Professor Lorraine Gamman, and design educator Jeffrey Doruff from Central Saint Martins’ Design Against Crime Research Lab (Gamman and Thorpe, 2018) to co-design the principles of a creative entrepreneurship course for young men inside HMP ISIS and establish a cross-sector partnership for scaling.
Rather than arriving with pre-designed curricula, we blended entrepreneurship education with the UK Design Council’s Double Diamond methodology to structure three 2-hour arts-based (Meltzer and Schwencke, 2020) co-design workshops around three distinct, but interwoven phases: Discover, Define, and Develop.
The first workshop encouraged participants to visualise their entrepreneurial future through materials and making. The second introduced entrepreneurial concepts via the embodied transformation of the learning space into an entrepreneur’s journey with different stations for dialogical encounters between participants and the project team: know your customer, your business, your story, your potential. Crucially, participants shaped content through their own business ideas and experiences, discussed in-depth in the third workshop.
A fourth session then consolidated learnings, facilitated by two expert entrepreneurs who provided valuable validation to the young entrepreneurs and to our approach. Building trust, and emotional safety was of paramount importance throughout the co-creation process with the use of facilitation and applied theatre techniques.
What We Discovered
Participants didn’t just engage; they sometimes drove the sessions. We found that balancing structured content with personalised support was crucial; applied theatre and facilitation techniques helped to build bridges between sessions, restoring imaginative energies and reinforcing the mutual trust we were building. The young men brought sophisticated understanding of market dynamics and customer relationships from lived experience, even if gained largely through the informal economy.
More surprisingly, we discovered the power of peer mentors as credible messengers. Xyrone, quickly became a key facilitator, inspiring interactions, collecting data and contributing to workshop design and evaluation discussions. Participants became the most effective programme advocates, demonstrating that authentic learning happens when learners feel genuine ownership.
Our students gained research experience, and facilitation skills enhancing their future journey into employment or entrepreneurship. Participants helped create something tangible: design ideas for a prototype creative entrepreneurship toolkit, informed by their needs and aspirations.
Lessons for Higher Education
Three key insights emerged. First, co-creation can play a crucial role for curricula that genuinely serve learners’ needs, however for co-creation to work clarity around the engagement process is of paramount importance for learners to feel that their rights are protected.
Second, authentic partnership requires genuine risk-sharing. Our students weren’t protected observers; they were contributors whose learning was shaped by the process.
Third, confined spaces – literal or metaphorical — need not limit educational potential. With thoughtful design and genuine partnership, constraints become catalysts for innovation and change.
Looking Forward
Our pilot generated more questions than answers, exactly as expected with exploratory research. How do we translate these ideas into a full currcillum? How do we scale whilst maintaining engagement quality? How can we further nurture the project’s cross-sector partnership?
Next steps involve data consolidation, report writing, and developing funding proposals for the next phase. We’re exploring pathways to higher education for participants, recognising that entrepreneurship education and university access aren’t mutually exclusive. Most importantly, we’re continuing the conversation. The relationships formed are part of an ongoing dialogue about how education can serve social justice.
Transformative Education in Practice
At the Learning and Teaching Festival 2025, our project presentation demonstrated how authentic partnership can unlearn educational norms whilst reimagining pedagogies for resilience.
We’ve shown that confined spaces can become potential spaces where meaningful relationships form. The young men in HMP Isis weren’t passive recipients; they were knowledgable co-creators, co-researchers, and co-teachers who reminded us that expertise comes in many forms.
We are aiming high. Although the best equivalent programmes can achieve recidivism rates as low as 10% compared to national averages of 46%, this isn’t just about reducing reoffending rates. It’s about recognising that transformative education requires transforming our assumptions about who can teach and learn. As we develop Creative U further, we’re piloting an approach to higher education that takes seriously the potential in unexpected places and fulfils the role of Universities as civic institutions.
References
Baumol, W. J. (1990). Entrepreneurship: Productive, unproductive, and destructive. Journal of Political Economy, 98(5, Part 1), 893-921.
Centre for Entrepreneurs. (2016). From inmates to entrepreneurs: How prison entrepreneurship can break the cycle of reoffending. Centre for Entrepreneurs.
Gamman, Lorraine and Thorpe, Adam (2018) Makeright – Bags of Connection: Teaching Design Thinking and Making in Prison to Help Build Empathic and Resilient Communities. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics and Innovation, 4 (1). pp. 91-110. ISSN 2405-8726
Meltzer, C. and Schwencke, E., 2020. Arts-based learning in vocational education: Using arts-based approaches to enrich vocational pedagogy and didactics and to enhance professional competence and identity. Journal of Adult and Continuing Education, 26(1), pp.6-24.
Chryssi Tzanetou is Principal Investigator on the Creative U project and a Teaching Fellow at the School of Business, Operations and Strategy, Greenwich Business School. Her research interests focus on participatory action research, drama, social enterprise, and inclusive entrepreneurship education.
Email: c.tzanetou@gre.ac.uk LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ctzanetou/
Dr. John Tull is Co-Investigator on the Creative U project and Lecturer in Business Management at the School of Business, Operations and Strategy, Greenwich Business School. His expertise lies in social entrepreneurship, innovation management, organisational learning and cross-sector partnerships.
Email: j.a.tull@greenwich.ac.uk LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johntull/
Xyrone Ishwar graduated from Greenwich Business School in July 2025 and served admirably as Research Assistant on the Creative U project. His involvement demonstrates the value of student-led research and diverse perspectives in academic inquiry.