D2.2: 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: A thorough procedure of examining existing literature was conducted in order to assess the target groups’ needs and requirements. Based on the literature review and the conceptual framework, two surveys geared towards PhD students and faculty were carried out. The surveys were subsequently complemented with a set of semi-structured interviews addressed to both faculty and doctoral candidates.
Analysis: The analysis of the data collected through the student and faculty surveys was conducted using primarily descriptive statistics in order to understand the participants’ learning and teaching needs, along with their interests. Furthermore, the analysis of the semi-structured interviews was carried out using a thematic analysis technique.
Results: The results show the findings of both surveys and interviews. Surveys provide a general overview on how students and faculty view entrepreneurship education in general and courses in particular. It is also useful to highlight the differences between the two groups showing that it
might serve to help to design courses that are more in line with what students want and need. Particularly, students demand more collaborative courses with inter-discipline and inter-university modules, in which they can discover and learn from people with highly diverse backgrounds and ideas. Regarding the courses’ content, students seem interested in finding resources and communication skills, which they consider the most important abilities to become an entrepreneur. Finally, interviews complement the results of the surveys and deepen the most relevant topics.
Conclusions: The needs and requirements of the target groups, namely doctoral students and faculty, were identified using two distinct surveys and several interviews. They show that PhD students’ knowledge on entrepreneurship is rather low yet also the high interest that some of them display. Faculty and students seem to agree in how the methodology of the courses should be but their ideas about the module’s content differ. On the one side, the faculty considers that encouraging students to develop innovation and creativity skills should be the focus of entrepreneurship training. Thus, according to the faculty members, the courses should focus on early entrepreneurship stages, which is associated with the idea generation phase. However, students seem to have a more practical outlook and demand courses where they can learn how to transform their ideas into business and how to earn money and resources. This implies a stronger interest in the later stages of entrepreneurship, which is associated with the commercialization of invention phases. Both groups appear to miss the stages in between, such as idea testing and validation. The results of this report may be used to improve entrepreneurial education and adapt the methods and materials to the students’ needs.