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Introduction
The United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Desa, 2016) specifies 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) that describe major development challenges for humanity. The purpose of the 17 SDGs is to secure a sustainable, peaceful, prosperous and equitable life on earth for everyone now and in the future, covering global challenges for long-term survival.
Governments, the private sector, higher education (HE) institutions and civil society need to take part in achieving the SDGs. Education has an important role in teaching a new vision of education on sustainability or education for sustainable development (ESD) (Rieckmann, 2017). In this new paradigm, education should foster the right types of values and skills that will lead to a sustainable and inclusive growth and a peaceful living together. The acquisition of competences for sustainable development by students will lead to a higher commitment to sustainability and SDGs (Fadeeva and Mochizuki, 2010; Cebrián and Junyent, 2015; Wiek et al., 2015) in face of unpredictable changing dynamic environments.
Promoting individual dynamic capabilities (IDCs) among university students can later affect how these future workers and managers will interact with others inside organisations in terms of creating a different culture that fosters innovation and understands firms as organisations with more objectives than only financial performance, as firms and organisations are crucial for building a society much more concerned with sustainability not only in environmental but also in social terms (Schaltegger and Wagner, 2011; Castiaux, 2012; Buil et al., 2016; del Mar Alonso-Almeida et al., 2017; Lukes and Stephan, 2017). Different institutions, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations or the European Commission and several national governments, implement policies to foster the acquisition of IDCs among students to educate them to act as change makers who will later on join the labour market.
In the abovementioned context of the governments’ willingness to take on responsibilities for education and the context of universities being the major players in the training of future managers, it is fundamental to understand that the new generation of digital natives (DNs) has some specific characteristics that affect their way of learning and working (Prensky, 2001; Bennett et al., 2008; Lai and Hong, 2015). Until now, scholars have centred their efforts on...