A COMPREHENSIVE ONTOLOGICAL LEARNING MODEL FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP TRAINING AMONG ENGINEERING STUDENTS

Entrepreneurship has become one of the most attractive ways to create jobs and re-invent career perspectives for engineers. Entrepreneurship benefits society in several ways; it promotes innovation, creates jobs, releases human potential and addresses new demands from consumers. Fostering entrepreneurship among engineers is a key feature to deploy business models adapted to uncertain and complex context situations.

Educational systems are essential in influencing personal attitudes that may rouse entrepreneurial intention. Those engineering schools which are aware of this challenge are pursuing initiatives to foster entrepreneurship among their students; we can assess some entrepreneurship modules in their programs.

However, current approaches in entrepreneurship training are insufficient to address social demands and company requirements. Entrepreneurship teaching paradigms based in transmitting techniques, tools and knowledge sets do not help to develop entrepreneurial individuals; they develop people informed about entrepreneurship. Society and economy need entrepreneurial individuals willing to commit themselves and assume leading roles. To achieve this goal entrepreneurship teaching strategies should consider students as a whole and train them in every aspect of human existence (language, emotions, perception, spiritual and physical).

In this work a comprehensive, ontological learning model is proposed, which acts upon the individual awakening his/her entrepreneurial spirit, and addressing at the same time the technical skills needed to business development.

This model is called The Comprehensive Ontological Learning Model Applied to Entrepreneurship (MOAI-e, by its Spanish acronym). It is built upon the teachings of Maturana, Flores and Varela, and can be summarized in five main aspects:
(1) the development of self-belief and self-assurance,
(2) the development of linguistic and conversational competencies,
(3) the development of attitude and competencies to lead and identify opportunities,
(4) teamwork and collaboration, and (5) development of innovation from historicity.

On top of this, tools and lean start-up methodologies are also developed.

To prove the impact of this model in entrepreneurial intentions, an empirical study was performed among engineering students.

To achieve this, a model of structural equations was developed according to Planned Action Theory (PAT), which was confronted with a questionnaire submitted to a panel of engineering students. The questionnaire was answered twice by the very same population to assess the impact of the MOAI-e training (1) before the training and (2) after completion.

A Smart-PLS 2.0 statistical set was used to perform statistical analysis. Apart from the structural equations analysis, a multigroup analysis was performed as a function of the period in which the questionnaire was performed.

The results show how training with MOAI-e has a positive impact not only in entrepreneurial intentions, but in preliminary variables explained by PAT: entrepreneurial attitude, planned behavior and subjective norms.

Conclusions show personal and contextual factors to foster entrepreneurship and the benefits of MOAI-e in doing so. It also helps to consolidate Planned Action Theory (PAT) as a global theoretical framework that contributes to understand psychosocial aspect of entrepreneurial behavior among engineers.