EDUCATING COMPUTER SCIENCE UNDERGRADUATES FOR DIGITAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP: A CASE STUDY OF A TEACHING MODEL INVOLVING A JUNIOR ENTERPRISE CREATED BY STUDENTS

Junior Enterprises play an important role as an enabling agent of the entrepreneurial spirit in Faculties and University Schools, constituting a very valuable resource to bring business reality closer to university students and providing them with a first contact with the professional world while they finish their education. In these Junior Enterprises, 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 their Faculty or University School but also oriented to deal with real projects and customers.

On the other hand, the aforementioned professional context, particularly in the IT environment, is undergoing a fast evolution due to an intensive promotion of digital entrepreneurship and the creation of IT startups. In this entrepreneurship-intensive ecosystem several new methodologies and tools have arisen to guide the process of creating a startup. These approaches are closely linked to some of the fundamentals of the Scientific Method and are being integrated progressively into academic and educational projects.

This paper presents the key elements of a teaching model for educating Computer Science undergraduates for digital entrepreneurship, developed and tested in a Computer Science Faculty and involving the already existing Junior Enterprise as the host for the teaching program and its representatives as teachers for their fellow students. The paper also describes a first experiment organizing a teaching program following such a model, its results and lessons learned for future executions of the program.

The aim of this teaching program is that students can learn and practice the methodological and technological aspects of creating a digital business, getting closer to modern technology stacks and new methods and tools such as the lean startup approach or the practice of customer development interviews. Students also develop small 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.