Educating Computer Science undergraduates for digital entrepreneurship: summary of our academic paper

During the 20th edition of the Spanish Annual Conference on Computer Science Education (held in Oviedo this year), we presented an academic paper (link to PDF, in Spanish) which describes our work designing and putting into practice a teaching program for the students of the Computer Science Faculty in San Sebastián, aiming at the development of competences for digital entrepreneurship among the students, with the invaluable help of the Junior Enterprise in the Faculty, Magna SIS. The goal of this work is to consolidate a model for such teaching programs that can be used in the short term as the core for a subject on Entrepreneurship and Innovative Projects (part of the future Master’s Degree on Computer Engineering), as well as a framework that can be applied in different university contexts (or learning environments in general).

The nuclear piece of this teaching model is the Junior Enterprise Magna SIS, as the environment where students can develop themselves as entrepreneurs using a “learning by doing” approach (an idea which fits perfectly with entrepreneurship education), in a more controlled environment, inside the Faculty but also oriented to deal with real projects and customers. We have built the teaching program around the Junior Enterprise with a direct involvement by their members, so that students can develop projects (which are integrated in the Junior Enterprise’s organizational project management structure) where they can make their first steps exploring a business idea aiming at creating an IT startup. Thus, the Junior Enterprise plays the role of a “pre-incubator” inside the university environment, where students can have a minimum contrast of the idea before entering an external incubation process. 

The rest of the key elements in the proposed model are the following:

• Learning contents, both methodological and technological, which cover all the fundamental aspects of a digital business and allow students to get closer to modern methods and tools such as the lean startup approach or the practice of customer development interviews.
• Digital entrepreneurship projects as the base for a “learning by doing” approach, where students face some contrast with real world, so that they assimilate some concepts relative to the idea of market, customer and value proposition.
• “Autonomous exploration” as the approach to assimilate and consolidate knowledge and competences to develop, aligned with proposals such as “effectual reasoning”.
• Collaborative work (based on blogs and peer assessment) which help students to share and build new knowledge, as well as register and verify their progress.

[Haz clic aquí para la versión en español de esta entrada]