Teaching undergraduate students entrepreneurship skills : a boot camp for high impact technological business projects

Our understanding of teaching and learning in higher education has grown exponentially, and in some cases has outpaced the conceptions of teaching. Bass (2012) describes how the fine boundary between the classroom and life experience, along with the increased power of social learning, and integrative contexts have created new ways of learning and disruptive teaching experiences. Literature has shown that entrepreneurship education benefits students from all socioeconomic backgrounds because it nurtures unique talents and skills, such as critical thinking, communication, and collaboration (Rodov & Truong, 2015). Moreover, Hegarty (2006) states that teaching entrepreneurship in universities can encourage students to look creatively at their future opportunities, and can help develop not only the capacity to start companies, but also to think creatively and ambitiously. Recognizing the value of teaching entrepreneurship, Universidad Panamericana has mandatory courses in the undergraduate curricula. Furthermore, this year, the university offered a full immersion semester-long entrepreneurship boot camp in collaboration with a private company: i-Lab, a program for high impact technological business projects. This paper presents the experiences of the students in the workshop, as well as the benefits and challenges faced by the participants. Fourteen students, four men and ten women participated in the i-Lab boot camp. Two participants were from the School of Pedagogy, and twelve from the College of Engineering. The camp was designed with the intent to develop entrepreneurial talent by guiding students through the process of building up ideas and making them real. Students defined how to solve a worldwide problem meaningfully with the correct business model. The methodology of the study was qualitative in order to understand and describe the experiences of undergraduate students attending the i-Lab camp. Data came from a questionnaire with open-ended questions sent to the students participants. In addition, individual interviews with the students were conducted. Preliminary findings focus on how entrepreneurship influenced the development of undergraduate students. They strengthened some skills such as teamwork, synthesis, analysis, self directed learning, leadership, negotiation, empathy, and critical thinking. Students described their experiences in i-Lab as very challenging but rewarding. In addition to hard work and the sacrifices they had to make in order for their projects to come through, they shared the importance of living the methodology, their personal growth, and how the experience enhanced their decision-making skills. Alongside this results, the findings provides insights to move to a student centered model. Higher Education Institutions need to include experiential learning projects and partner with different centers inside and outside the university to reshape the curricula and provide different learning experiences. ©2018 INTED2018 Proceedings