In the engineering education field, there is an identified need of innovative learning and teaching methods to improve students’ entrepreneurship competencies in order to make connections between engineering and real society. This chapter addresses a management strategy for entrepreneurship projects in the university framework. It is the result of a cooperative experience from the Research Groups of Salesian Polytechnic University (UPS), the Technical University of Madrid (UPM), and the collaboration of other external entities. The management strategy is applied to undergraduate and postgraduate programs at UPS and has been called Coworking StartUPS Project. The research method is made up of different teaching methodologies—project‐based learning, coworking, case studies—and different activities in and out of the university. The data were collected from students who were enrolled in the Coworking StartUPS Project, along with students and researchers from the three University Branch Campuses in the cities of Cuenca, Quito, and Guayaquil. The Coworking StartUPS Project links teaching & research activities with entrepreneurship are founded in cooperation and interaction, offering multiple possibilities for entrepreneurial skills development in the international context. This preprofessional experience promotes students to integrate the knowledge they have learnt and apply the new knowledge in an entrepreneurship project.
Part of the book: Case Study of Innovative Projects
This chapter presents a new proposal for supporting the management of research processes in universities and higher education centers. To this aim, the authors have developed a comprehensive ecosystem that implements a knowledge model that addresses three innovative aspects of research: (i) acceleration of knowledge production, (ii) research valorization and (iii) discovery of improbable peers. The ecosystem relies on ontologies and intelligent modules and is able to automatically retrieve information of major scientific databases such as SCOPUS and Science Direct to infer new information. Currently, the system is able to provide guidelines to create improbable research peers as well as automatically generate resilience graphics and reports from more than 17,000 tuples of the ontological database. In this work, the authors describe in detail an important aspect of support systems for research management in higher education: the development and valorization of competences of students collaborating in research process and startUPS of universities. Furthermore, a knowledge model of entrepreneurship (startUPS) as well as an analyzer of general and specific competences based on data mining processes is presented.
Part of the book: Management of Information Systems