Strategy education has faced enduring criticism over the last decades. In particular, critics have argued that strategy education would not sufficiently resemble strategy practice. Co-Creation-education teaching holds significant promise for strategy education, implying a fundamental role shift for students from passive receivers to active creators and offering the potential to mirror strategy practice. Freedom, responsibility, and real world relevance in co-creation-based education, however, may also become a burden for students required to transition into a strategy role in the classroom, most likely without practical experiences in strategy. This burden is particularly critical in strategy education, given the field’s elusive nature and its inherent ambiguity. This paper explores how ambiguity shapes students’ transition into a strategy role and influences their learning outcomes in the context of a co-creation-based strategy course. Building on extensive qualitative data to trace students’ learning journey, we find that students experienced a sequence of distinct types of ambiguity (‘entry ambiguity’, ‘content ambiguity’, and ‘outcome ambiguity’). We further show that students responded to these ambiguities by drawing on distinct individual, social and material resources. The interplay of students’ experiences and their responses had significant role implications (‘role readiness’, ‘role effectiveness’, and ‘role confidence’), ultimately leading to a strong sense of the strategy role by the end of the course. We incorporate these findings into a conceptual model on ambiguity and role transistions and make several contributions to the literature on strategy education.
