New curriculum enables academics to support technology students’ path to innovation and entrepreneurship
While it is widely accepted that adding business and entrepreneurial training to a technical curriculum improves the caliber of graduates, finding ways to effectively blend business skills into an education program has been a challenge for faculty.
In an attempt to bridge the gap between technology education and entrepreneurial skill-set development, Microsoft has partnered with various university-level institutions across Europe as part of a pilot initiative to encourage usage of the Software Entrepreneurship for Students curriculum.
Five hands-on workshops were given to develop and provide technical universities and colleges with a flexible software business management curriculum for science and software students. The Software Entrepreneurship for Students curriculum gives technical faculty the tools to introduce students to real-world management skills and competencies needed to fuel innovation, support entrepreneurs and aid employability of the next generation.
The Software Entrepreneurship for Students hands-on workshop was delivered in five European countries during May and June 2007 in preparation for using the content in the next academic year.
Feedback from Students and Faculty
The pilot workshops – held at academic institutions in Portugal, Poland, Germany, Spain and Denmark – attracted a mix of faculty members and students.
Attendees at the Portugal workshop included Miguel Vicente, a Microsoft Student Partner who is a student at the Faculdade de Engenharia (faculty of engineering) at Universidade do Porto.
Microsoft Student Partners will help create awareness for this curriculum at their university and can encourage the usage by faculty and student associations.
Vicente believes the Software Entrepreneurship for Students curriculum is valuable not only for students aspiring to become entrepreneurs and business founders, but also provides “the kind of positive thinking” that is valuable for employees within existing businesses who want to make a difference in the market”.
As a Microsoft Student Partner, Vicente is enthusiastic about being involved in a peer-to-peer evangelizing initiative to encourage up-take of the Software Entrepreneurship for Students curriculum, one of several initiatives planned during 2008 to grow support in Portugal for the program.
Value for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
Another attendee at the Portugal pilot workshop was Paulo Sousa, a faculty member of the School of Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of Porto.
Sousa said the institute recently added entrepreneurship curriculum to its study program, which is being taught by business professors, and he believed the availability of content in the form of the Software Entrepreneurship for Students curriculum would be of value to other institutions that were on the path to making a similar move.
He said with processes to add new content to an institution’s curriculum often being complex and taking a long time, introducing Software Entrepreneurship for Students content in the form of summer schools or evening workshops may be the most practical approach for many institutions.
Connecting Science and Business Education
In Denmark, delivery of the pilot Entrepreneurship for Students program generated strong interest and a commitment from faculty to teach the type of curriculum put forward, says Microsoft Denmark Academic Relations Manager Henrik Westergaard Hansen.
Hansen said he will use the curriculum to attempt to build bridges between second-tier technical and business educational institutions in Denmark which could form valuable partnerships through teaching the Entrepreneurship for Students program.
“The really good thing about this is not that it presents content that is brand new, but that the context and the framework around the content is flexible and simple,” said Pia Peterson, a faculty member who attended the pilot workshop in Denmark.