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Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) scholarship has embraced a socio-cultural turn that places attention on underrepresented groups and values contexts that house less visible forms of work, process, and organization. We extend this discussion by aligning soft skills with everyday entrepreneurial practices as another route for teaching students social and cultural awareness. We argue this pedagogical shift will help students succeed as communicators to diverse audiences given the demands of today's globally diverse workplace. Cultivating entrepreneurial expertise alongside soft skills can produce students who are more attuned to diversity and inequity, and are able to reshape workplace contexts to be more socially just. We situate entrepreneurs as everyday rhetoricians to demonstrate opportunities to teach students fruitful ways to foster socially attuned communicative practices, thereby contributing to the development of the students' own professional identities. To this end, we present a case study highlighting everyday entrepreneurship framed by participants whose identities are attuned toward social justice. Next, we apply the entrepreneurial values demonstrated by those cases to teaching redefined notions of "soft skills, " which are traditionally seen as a nebulous amalgam of generic rhetorical and communicative skills. We conclude with next steps and pedagogical interventions to help cultivate these entrepreneurial skills among TPC students.

Entrepreneurship is typically understood as capitalist, but new models are emerging; these new models, like Welter et al.’s “everyday-entrepreneur,” can be understood in the tradition of techné, in which entrepreneurship is an embodied practice balancing the sociality of identity politics and the materiality of objects and infrastructures. With no English equivalent, techné is typically understood as either art, skill or craft, but none of the placeholders provide a suitable encapsulation of the term itself (Pender). Examining identity against the backdrop of entrepreneurship illuminates the rhetorical ways entrepreneurs cultivate and innovate the processes of making, especially in terms of the material cultures that this process springs from and operates within. Intersectional issues related to entrepreneurial identity present opportunities for diversification and growth in the existing scholarship. A reframing of entrepreneurial identity and continued development of Welter et al.’s everyday-entrepreneurship is argued for, showing how social biases render gender and objects invisible. The article uses data from an on-going study to demonstrate how reframing entrepreneurial identity uncovers the ways in which systemic biases are embedded in the relationship between identity and everyday things. The case study delves into connections between identity, technology, and innovation illustrating how entrepreneurial identity can be seen as a kind of techné, which helps readers better understand identity in relation to material objects and culture—including the biases at work there.

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