Social network tools and procedures for developing entrepreneurial skills in PhD programmes

Participantes

CENTRE INTERNACIONAL DE METODES NUMERICS EN ENGINYERIA (CIMNE)

The International Centre for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE) is a research organization created in 1987 at the heart of the prestigious Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) as a partnership between the Government of Catalonia and UPC, in cooperation with UNESCO. The aim of CIMNE is the development of numerical methods and computational techniques for advancing knowledge and technology in engineering and applied sciences. The ultimate goal of CIMNE is to become an international reference centre and leader in computational mechanics, through achieving excellence in all the activities carried out by the centre.

UNIVERSIDAD CARLOS III DE MADRID (UC3M)

UC3M’s mission is to contribute to the improvement of society through teaching of the highest quality and cutting-edge research in line with stringent international guidelines. The University aspires to excellence in all its activities, with the aim of becoming one of the top universities in Europe.

INSTITUT DE PREPARATION A L’ADMINISTRATION ET A LA GESTION (IPAG)

The IPAG Business School mission is to promote appropriate management in a globalized and rapidly-changing world. To this end, IPAG Business School relies on:

• Top-level research that enriches the academic principles of its subjects
• A great network with the business sector
• An appreciation among students for the diversity of cultures and knowledge
• Raising our student’s awareness of major contemporary issues and ethics

IPAG Business School objective is to train multi-skilled, adaptable and responsible managers.

FOUNDATION WEGEMT – A EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITIES IN MARINE TECHNOLOGY AND RELATED SCIENCES (WEGEMT)

WEGEMT aims to update and extend the skills, knowledge and competence of practising engineers and postgraduate students working at an advanced level in marine technology and related sciences. WEGEMT achieves this aim by encouraging universities to be associated with it for them to work collectively as a network, and to actively collaborate in relevant initiatives. WEGEMT considers collaborative R&D, E&T at an advanced level, and the exchange and dissemination of information, as activities which further the aim of the Association.

The project is built on the collaboration with four running ERASMUS+ and MSCA-ITN projects, involving 20 higher education institutions from nine different EU countries, and more than twenty-five companies and research centers. Besides, four H2020 running projects and sixteen other European associations and organizations will also collaborate with the project by becoming members of the Expert Advisory Board of prodPhD. This collaboration will be fundamental for the specific requirements analysis and for the development and assessment of the demonstration actions to which all the collaborating institutions will be invited to participate.

Project’s overall Objective

The project will deliver and demonstrate, through different pilot actions, a social network-based training methodology, which will include the necessary teaching guidelines and specific “learning by doing” materials for entrepreneurship training, as well as the required prodPhD Online Training Environment, integrating customized collaborative work and social network solutions.

The main objective of the prodPhD project is to implement innovative social network-based methodologies for teaching and learning entrepreneurship in PhD programmes.

Lines of Research

• The project embraces the initiatives of the European Commission to promote the open access to research data, aiming to improve and maximize access to and reuse of research data generated by Horizon 2020 projects. In this sense prodPhD will adhere to the Open Research Data Pilot (ORD Pilot) fostered by the European Commission, and this DMP will be developed following the standards of data storage, access and management. This plan will detail what data will be generated through the project, whether and how it will be made accessible for the verification and reuse and how it will be curated and preserved.
• The multidisciplinary teaching and learning methodologies to be developed will enable entrepreneurship education to be introduced into any PhD programme, providing students with the knowledge, skills, and motivation to engage in entrepreneurial activities. However, the use of the output of the project will depend on the nature and profile of the research or scientific field. In this context, key performance indicators (KPIs) form the base on which the quality and scope of the methodologies developed in the project will be quantified and benchmarked.
• The project’s final product will be an online tool that higher education students can use to learn entrepreneurship from a social network perspective. Performance measurement is one of the first steps of any project and involves the choice and use of indicators to measure the effectiveness and success of the project’s methods and results. All the KPIs have been selected according to criteria of relevance, measurability, reliability, and adequacy, and they cover the process, dissemination methods, and overall quality of the project.
• The prodPhD project aims to address the challenging problem of introducing entrepreneurship training in PhD programmes regardless of discipline. The prodPhD project will create the necessary teaching methodologies and the platform for applying them.

Main considerations

• Universities at large need to increase their offering of entrepreneurship education.
• In this project, entrepreneurship is seen as a transversal competence that educators can use in any discipline to foster the entrepreneurial mind-sets and skills of their students.
• This proposal is motivated by the conviction that the methodologies to stimulate future entrepreneurs can benefit from the new social networking and collaborative work technologies.

Internal Meetings

• Social network tools and procedures for developing entrepreneurial skills in PhD programme. Preparatory webmeeting (14 January 2020).
• Social network tools and procedures for developing entrepreneurial skills in PhD programme. Kick off meeting (29 January 2021).

Events

1ST EXTERNAL ADVISORY BOARD WORKSHOP (20 October 2021)

The meeting, online due to the pandemic situation, was attended by all the members of the consortium from the entities WEGEMT, IPAG, UC3M, CIMNE and SCIPEDIA, and 13 expert members of the External Advisory Board of the project. The event started with a general presentation of the ProdPhD project given by the members of the consortium. After that, a discussion on the relevant aspects of the project. The aim of the workshop was to get valuable suggestions and feedback from different external experts in entrepreneurship education.

Publications in scientific journals

Reports

Data Management Plan

1. García-Espinosa, C. Soriano (prodPhD OA (2021). 4)

Published on 16/09/21

DOI: 10.23967/prodphd.2021.9.003
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA license

This document presents the deliverable D8.1 – the Data Management Plan (DMP) of work package 8 of the prodPhD project. It aims to present the plan for the management, generation, collection, security, preservation and sharing of data generated through the prodPhD project. The DMP is a key element for organizing the project’s data. It provides an analysis of the data, which will be collected, processed and published by the prodPhD consortium. The project embraces the initiatives of the European Commission to promote the open access to research data, aiming to improve and maximize access to and reuse of research data generated by Horizon 2020 projects. In this sense prodPhD will adhere to the Open Research Data Pilot (ORD Pilot) fostered by the European Commission, and this DMP will be developed following the standards of data storage, access and management. This plan will detail what data will be generated through the project, whether and how it will be made accessible for the verification and reuse and how it will be curated and preserved. In this context, the term data applies to the information generated during the different experimental campaigns carried out in the project, and specifically to the data, including associated metadata, to be used to validate the computational models and the technical solutions to be developed in the project.

This document is the first version of the DMP and may be updated throughout the project, if significant changes (new data, changes in consortium policies, changes in consortium composition, etc.) arise.

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

Sanz, P. Alonso, B. Haidar, H. Ghaemi, L. García (prodPhD OA (2021). 3)

Published on 16/09/21

DOI: 10.23967/prodphd.2021.9.002
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA license

The use of the output of the project will depend on the nature and profile of the research or scientific field. In this context, key performance indicators (KPIs) form the base on which the quality and scope of the methodologies developed in the project will be quantified and benchmarked.

The project’s final product will be an online tool that higher education students can use to learn entrepreneurship from a social network perspective. Performance measurement is one of the first steps of any project and involves the choice and use of indicators to measure the effectiveness and success of the project’s methods and results. All the KPIs have been selected according to criteria of relevance, measurability, reliability, and adequacy, and they cover the process, dissemination methods, and overall quality of the project. In this document, each KPI is defined together with the units and instruments for measuring it. In the case of qualitative KPIs, five-level Likert scales are defined to improve indicator measurability and reliability.

The KPIs for prodPhD are divided into three main dimensions, depending on the stage of the project they evaluate. The three main dimensions are performance and development (which are highly related to the project’s process), dissemination and impact (which are more closely correlated with the project’s output), and overall project quality. Different sources (i.e., European projects and papers) have been drawn upon to define a set of 51 KPIs classified into six categories, according to the project phase they aim to evaluate. An Excel tool has been developed that collects all the KPIs analysed in the production of this document. This tool is shared in the Scipedia repository.

Needs and requirements analysis

Sanz, M. Lascurain, A. Serrano, B. Haidar, P. Alonso, J. García-Espinosa (prodPhD OA (2021). 2)

Published on 16/09/21

DOI: 10.23967/prodphd.2021.9.001
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA license

The prodPhD project aims to address the challenging problem of introducing entrepreneurship training in PhD programmes regardless of discipline. The prodPhD project will create the necessary teaching methodologies and the platform for applying them. The project consists of a consortium of four organizations from across Europe.

The main objective of the prodPhD project is to implement innovative social network-based methodologies for teaching and learning entrepreneurship in PhD programmes. The multidisciplinary teaching and learning methodologies will enable entrepreneurship education to be introduced into any PhD programme, providing students with the knowledge, skills, and motivation to engage in entrepreneurial activities. The methodology will be conceived to develop experiential knowledge, involving academics, entrepreneurship experts, and mentors in its development and implementation. Besides, the exchange of experience, competences, and approaches facilitated by social networking will pave the way to crowdsourcing new ideas, improving training methodologies, and stimulating academics’ entrepreneurial skills.

Introduction and overview of the prodPhD project

García-Espinosa (prodPhD OA (2021). 1)

Published on 18/02/21

Licence: CC BY-NC-SA license

The main objective of the prodPhD project is to implement innovative social network-based methodologies for teaching and learning entrepreneurship in PhD programmes. The multidisciplinary teaching and learning methodologies to be developed will allow introducing entrepreneurship education in any PhD programme of a higher education institution, providing students with the knowledge, skills and motivation to engage in entrepreneurial activities. The methodology will be conceived to develop experiential knowledge, involving academics, entrepreneurship experts and mentors in its development and implementation, by taking advantage of the use of customized collaborative social network tools. Besides, the exchange of experience, competences and approaches facilitated by social networking will allow crowdsourcing new ideas, improving training methodologies and stimulating entrepreneurial skills of academics.

Impact

Educators have a key role in making entrepreneurial learning possible. Outside the traditional domain of business schools and economic faculties, the lack of educators with the necessary skills, knowledge and methods to teach entrepreneurship effectively is one of the main bottlenecks that hinder a widespread development of entrepreneurship education in European universities.

The prodPhD project will deliver a methodology and the corresponding guidelines to support the design and development of training modules. Those training modules will be based on the ‘training by doing’ concept, and will contribute to develop a broad package of entrepreneurship-related skills in the PhD students, including business knowledge, financial literacy, leadership and teamwork, initiative, problem solving, critical thinking, decision-making, ability to persuade, etc.

Nevertheless, what is especially remarkable in this project is the implication of business school’s experts and entrepreneurs in the application of those training modules, which will be facilitated and implemented thanks to the use of social networking tools. These tools will be customized to fulfil the requirements of the training materials, and that will enable the different players to share experiences that will be matched to exchange competences and approaches.

ProdPhD is a research project funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme.

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