Promoting entrepreneurship among informatics engineering students: insights from a case study

ABSTRACT

Universities seek to promote entrepreneurship through effective education approaches, which need to be in permanent evolution. Nevertheless, the literature in entrepreneurship education lacks empirical evidence. This article discusses relevant issues related to promoting entrepreneurship in the software field, based on the experience of a 15-European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System course. This course seeks to instil in the students the recognition of the need to reconcile technical and business visions, organisational and commercial aspects, most of which have never been addressed previously. A series of semi-structured interviews made it possible to obtain relevant insights about the teaching–learning process underlying this course and its evolution over a seven-year period. Materials related with this course have been analysed, namely guidelines produced by the teachers and deliverables produced by the students. This article discusses the dimensions that were identified as fundamental for promoting entrepreneurship skills in the field of software, namely teamwork, project engagement, and contact with the market.

KEYWORDS:

• Entrepreneurship
• project-based course
• requirements engineering
• software
• business modelling

Notes on contributors

João M. Fernandes is a full professor at the Department of Informatics/Centro ALGORITMI, University of Minho (Portugal). He conducts his research activities in software engineering, with a special interest in modelling, requirements engineering, and embedded software. He is the author of more than 100 scientific papers and the main author of the book ‘Requirements in Engineering Projects’ (Springer 2016). He has been involved in the organisation of various international events.

Paulo S. Afonso is an assistant professor at the Department of Production and Systems and a researcher at Centro ALGORITMI, University of Minho (Portugal). His research interests include entrepreneurship, strategic innovation, and new business model design. He has training, consultancy, and mentoring experience in entrepreneurship for more than one decade, namely in the startup accelerator program IdeaLab and in the Portuguese National Mentoring Network.

Victor Fonte is an assistant professor in the Department of Informatics, University of Minho (Portugal), and a member of the High Assurance Software Laboratory, a research unit of the same institution and associated with INESC TEC. His research interests are in distributed systems, particularly regarding causality tracking in autonomous operation environments and in distributed key-value stores.

Victor Alves is an assistant professor in the Department of Informatics, University of Minho (Portugal), member of Centro ALGORITMI, performing his research activities within the Computer Science and Technologies (CST) R&D line in the area of biomedical engineering, particularly in medical imaging.

António Nestor Ribeiro is an assistant professor at the Department of Informatics, University of Minho (Portugal), and a member of the High Assurance Software Laboratory, a research unit of the same institution and associated with INESC TEC. His research interests are in object-oriented modelling and analysis techniques and on the software engineering aspects of HCI.

ORCiD

João M. Fernandes http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1174-1966

Paulo Afonso http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3882-2491

Victor Fonte http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8866-6269

Victor Alves http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1819-7051

António Nestor Ribeiro http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0681-8909