D2.1 Needs and requirements analysis
Creators: name: Sanz-Casado, Elias
name: Lascurain-Sánchez, María Luisa
name: Serrano-López, Antonio Eleazar
name: Bojam-Haidar, Ali
name: Alonso-Álvarez, Patricia
name: García-Espinosa, Julio
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021
Subjects: PhD programmes
Entrepreneurial skills
Social network tools and procedures

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