Abstract
This chapter focuses on entrepreneurship having students as actors. Students were engaged in the development of a business project. They turned ideas into action in a creative and innovative process. The academic study was conducted at a Polytechnic Health school. They used the management common tools to develop the idea and they experienced the role of an entrepreneur. Conversely, one of the aspects that contributed to the motivation for this work lies into the existing gap concerning project management applied to entrepreneurship. The current literature focuses on the definition of the business plan, a static component of entrepreneurship, which is fundamental for financing domains, but it neglects the dynamic component essential for the development of a business idea. The student majors' rewards were related with the teamwork environment: collaboration, communication, and creativity. This chapter provides to entrepreneurship educators, valuable insights on how to improve the effectiveness of the business project requirements in entrepreneurship education curriculum.
TopBackground
This section presents the conceptual background taken into consideration to teach entrepreneurship course for health students’ degrees: entrepreneur characteristics, entrepreneurship concept and learning skills, and project management learning skills. Authors did not find consistent definition of entrepreneur since an entrepreneur reflects the dominant values of his/her national culture. Our decision was to start from the classical authors’ opinions, afterwards, the European Commission and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) considerations about the theme, then, the focus is on the literature concerning the entrepreneurship learning skills thoughts. Finally, a portrait about entrepreneurship education is described.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Learning by Experience: Is the learning people achieve by reflecting on the experiences they face.
Product Acceptance: Means any product or service designed to be used by the defined user and/or by the target market.
Business Idea: It is the idea that results from a group discussion that can be materialized into a product or service and used by the defined target user.
Interaction Design: A goal-oriented problem-solving activity informed by projected use, target domain, materials, cost, and feasibility; a creative activity; a decision-making activity.
Design process: Is a series of steps to be followed in order to come up with a solution to a problem.
Creativity: The process used on the development of thinking and cognitive skills.
Business model: Defines the product or service that a team or organization will produce or deliver, its target audience, the method of creation, and its sources of income.