D2.1 Needs and requirements analysis

Introduction: The prodPhD project aims to address the challenging problem of introducing
entrepreneurship training in PhD programmes regardless of discipline. The prodPhD project will
create the necessary teaching methodologies and the platform for applying them. The project
consists of a consortium of four organizations from across Europe.
The main objective of the prodPhD project is to implement innovative social network-based
methodologies for teaching and learning entrepreneurship in PhD programmes. The multidisciplinary
teaching and learning methodologies will enable entrepreneurship education to be introduced into
any PhD programme, providing students with the knowledge, skills, and motivation to engage in
entrepreneurial activities. The methodology will be conceived to develop experiential knowledge,
involving academics, entrepreneurship experts, and mentors in its development and implementation.
Besides, the exchange of experience, competences, and approaches facilitated by social networking
will pave the way to crowdsourcing new ideas, improving training methodologies, and stimulating
academics’ entrepreneurial skills.
Aims and scope: The main aim of this work package was to study and identify the needs and
requirements of the target groups and to carry out a state-of-the-art analysis with a particular focus
on offering entrepreneurship courses to PhD students. The target groups were sorted into two
subgroups: PhD students and faculty. Both subgroups were deemed to have valuable insights that
would help in the endeavour to build a comprehensive multidisciplinary approach to
entrepreneurship training courses.
Methodology: Two surveys directed at PhD students and faculty were carried out. Both surveys were
reviewed by a panel of experts and pre-tested by a small sample of participants. After feedback from
subject matter experts and the pre-test were incorporated, the surveys were distributed.
Analysis: The analysis of the data collected through the student and faculty surveys was conducted
using primarily descriptive statistics in order to infer the learning and teaching needs and interests of
the participants. Deliverable D2.1 focuses mainly on measures of central tendency, means, totals,
percentages, and frequencies.
Results: The survey results revealed some interesting findings. The descriptives from the student
survey show that 64% of doctoral students had not received any entrepreneurship training, and 70%
were interested in attending additional entrepreneurship courses. The results from the faculty
survey, meanwhile, indicate that 91% of the respondents had never taught courses related to
entrepreneurship, although 41% were interested in doing so if they had the opportunity. Those not
interested cited their main reasons as lack of the proper skills to teach entrepreneurship and lack of
time.
Conclusion: The needs and requirements of the target groups - i.e., doctoral students and faculty -
were identified using two distinct surveys. The results gleaned from the literature and the survey
findings complement each other. The literature on entrepreneurship highlights the importance of
and need for innovative methods to teach entrepreneurship in higher education, while the survey
findings confirm the arguments laid out in the literature and reveal a need for entrepreneurship
training. This has important policy implications for the creation and introduction of the
methodologies and outcomes of the prodPhD project.