Abstract:

One of the main purposes of social entrepreneurship is to create new, innovative, and sustainable forms of solving social problems that may produce a social impact on societies. Even though social entrepreneurship is a term and a practice that lacks a permanent definition, it has been used as a key to the future of economic models, sustainability models and, of course, to the future of Higher Education (HE) programs and syllabus around the world.

During the most recent decades, the increasing value of skills and competencies in the labour market has stimulated High Education Institutions (HEI) to use social entrepreneurship to create new programs that may have a real impact on the way students develop their competencies and in the way that see social problems as opportunities. However, several challenges may be pointed out, for example, the excess of desk work and the lack of a practical component that allows students to develop, in real-time, their hard and soft skills and their capacity of dealing with the real context of a social entrepreneur.

This paper describes the experience and results of a pilot initiative led by the University of Aveiro that enabled students to have an approach to research, which allowed the development of transversal skills, closing on the proposal of an innovative solution for the resolution of a social problem. The initiative involves the collaboration of a multidisciplinary team in the University, including researchers from the domains of Economics, Management, Design and Health Sciences.

The fieldwork incorporated a stepwise methodology that includes:
i) a systematic literature review to increase the knowledge about social entrepreneurship, the skills needed for the future;
ii) a phase of exploratory fieldwork, where the researchers were able to create a first survey, identify the best system and curricular unit to apply the experience;
iii) the selection of the students and the identification of motivation systems;
iv) the conduction of a set of mentorship sessions that helped to guide students through all the processes and completing the system created;
v) the repetition of the survey and the follow up of all the results.

In this paper, the full methodology is described and discussed, leading to the identification of key success factors and constraints faced by HEI aiming to create a new and innovative form of teaching social entrepreneurship focusing on the development of the student's skills.

Keywords:

Social entrepreneurship, competencies, entrepreneurship, COIL.