“We were proud of our idea”: How teens and teachers gained value in an entrepreneurship and making project

While the potential of digital fabrication, making, and entrepreneurship education for empowering children and for increasing their abilities to shape the society and our digital future have been acknowledged in the literature, these educational trends have mostly been studied separately in Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) research. Additionally, while digital fabrication and making have been discussed quite extensively in relation to the role of Design Protagonist in the CCI literature, the relevance of entrepreneurship education on this role remains quite unexplored. We combined digital fabrication, making, and entrepreneurship education in a business innovation project with teenagers at school context. Through our qualitative, interpretive analysis, where we use value co-creation as our theoretical lens, we show what kind of value was expected and gained in this collaborative endeavor. Teachers valued learning new teaching methods and the possibilities of digital fabrication. Teens appreciated the change in scenery and routine and working on digital fabrication. They indicated learning useful things about the project topics during groupwork and experienced feelings of success related to their performance and the group project. We also identify challenges hindering value creation for teachers and students: differing expectations on the roles and responsibilities of adult participants, and difficulty balancing the fun, free making activities with the entrepreneurship aspects of the project. We discuss the implications of business innovation for the Design Protagonist role of children and identify balancing acts needed when supporting children to adopt the role for driving business innovation in the future digitalized society.