Abstract:

The Institutional Project for Transversal Competence at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) was instituted during the 2015/16 academic year, imposing an obligation upon all master’s and bachelor’s programs to integrate a suite of 13 transversal competencies into their curricula. Prominently featured among these competencies is Innovation, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship, in recognition of its essential role in equipping students with the skills necessary to innovate and engage in entrepreneurial ventures. Presently, UPV encourages the growth of this skill set through curriculum-embedded learning activities and the provision of supplemental initiatives such as the Generación Espontánea Programme and the IDEAS UPV, which serve to assist and oversee student-driven innovation. However, coordination between these educational strategies has not been fully realized.

In light of these circumstances, an Educational Improvement Plan has been meticulously delineated to bolster the acquisition of the aforementioned transversal competency amongst UPV students. The objective of the plan is the seamless integration of diverse institutional resources, with the aim of maximizing the efficacy of collective efforts and capitalizing on potential collaborative advantages. It envisions the active participation of a consortium of UPV stakeholders, representative of varying academic specialties and administrative capacities, to foster a heightened engagement in entrepreneurial pursuits. The detailed plan includes the articulation of explicit objectives, a phased action plan encompassing enumerated work stages, a designated timeline, and established procedures for systematic monitoring.

The project includes a first phase of situation analysis and diagnosis, followed by the implementation of improvement measures in a second phase. The start of this first phase involved structured research on the perceptions of students enrolled in subjects that serve as a reference for this transversal competence. An anonymous questionnaire was disseminated among 6,771 students spanning 78 different courses across a variety of schools and bachelor’s programs, yielding a total of 297 respondents. The data revealed a pronounced inclination towards entrepreneurship as a professional pursuit among the students. Nonetheless, it simultaneously exposed the modest impact of the existing pedagogic interventions aimed at enhancing this skill. These insights underscore the imperative for the proposed comprehensive educational strategy, which seeks not merely to amalgamate instructional methodologies, but rather to optimize and amplify entrepreneurship education's overall influence on student professional growth within the UPV community.

Keywords:

Creativity, Educational improvement plan, Entrepreneurship, Innovation.