vol. 11 núm. 18 (2015)

This case report describes the analysis of two organizations that work with entrepreneurships: The Center for Entrepreneurs of the Social Economy of the City of Santa Fe (Centro de Emprendedores de la Economía Social de la ciudad de Santa Fe, cees) and the Regional Incubator of Peoples’ Cooperatives of USFCar in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In the context of those experiences, a set of actions being carried out was identified, but which are insufficient for consolidation of the model for integral accompaniment and strengthening. In response to this situation, the authors designed an “Integral Training Program” of training, assistance and accompaniment for entrepreneurs, beginning with the initial stage of enterprise creation and continuing until maturation, to achieve sustainability over time and the capacity for self-management. A detailed description is given of the design of this program. Finally, some recommendations are made to support this type of initiatives, including the design of public policies that encourage and commit contributions from the state budget, and from the academic community, the commitment to transparency and autonomy that would sustain and provide continuity

This article is a product of the Extension Project for Entrepreneurs at the Olavarría Engineering Faculty of the Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina, which focused on providing quality training, broadening and modernizing the offering of professional training, and prioritizing the line of education through cooperative work and entrepreneurship in the framework of social economy among young people serving prison sentences. The research was carried out at the Centro Cerrado Leopoldo Lugones de Azul, with young people under the age of 18 who were on trial or serving prison sentences. 17 youths received 11 systematized visits, at a determined time and day of the week. A space was generated in which six engineering students would share their knowledge about entrepreneurship for two hours with the aim of encouraging the young people to begin new life projects. Entrepreneurs from the community were also present and told of their experiences as a strategy for reinforcing the theoretical concepts and, from there, to pinpoint enterprises through the vocational workshops available at the institution. The most representative result of the project was getting the young people to recognize a different way of learning while identifying other possible ways of living for undertaking new projects.

This article of reflection not derived from research analyzes how support programs for entrepreneurs acquire increasingly greater importance for governments, universities and organizations, beginning with the existence of a positive correlation between economic growth and the creation of companies. The countryside and agribusinesses are a very competitive area in many South American countries, which do not generally have a particular approach in the field of entrepreneurship, taking into account the differentiating characteristics of the rural sphere. This article analyzes how local productive chains are an important source of opportunities for entrepreneurs, which merit a closer look because such chains make it possible to avoid taking actions to strengthen the productive sector in isolation and, on the contrary, to improve their opportunities for success or optimize their effects. While it is the entrepreneurs themselves who identify opportunities, the productive chains can be a good venue for doing so and support programs should pay special attention to them. The importance of productive chains in an entrepreneurial development process stems, among other reasons, from the fact that they facilitate knowledge of each dimension of economic activity in localities and identify opportunities based on them.

This is a case report on the Regional Program for Enterprise and Innovation in Engineering (precitye from its Spanish acronym) carried out by representative institutions in the training of engineers in Argentina (confedi), Chile (condefi), Brazil (abenge) and Uruguay (anii). The article addresses relevant aspects of this program, which had support from entities responsible for higher education in the above-mentioned countries and from the “Regional Public Goods Program” of the Inter-American Development Bank. Starting with an analysis of the context and linking it to the policies of the confedi (Federal Council of Deans of Engineering of the Republic of Argentina), a description was made of the situations that facilitated the unprecedented development, because of both its scope and distributed logic, along with participation by professors from four countries in determining the critical parameters of the different activities and products. Details are given about the fundamental theories in the field of education for entrepreneurship or entrepreneurial education, which served as a guide in designing the program and defining its activities. A final section briefly describes the products generated, which then led to the creation of goods for public consumption. The article concludes with the need to address the complex processes of continuous improvement of engineering teaching through collaborative schemes among representative institutions that group together academic training units for engineers.

This article of reflection analyzes how the Red Emprendedorismo e Innovación en América Latina (Emprendesur) boosts joint work by all actors committed to developing regional or ecosystems for enterprise and innovation with an emphasis on education and training for enterprising individuals. Based on the well-known formulation of the entrepreneurial ecosystem proposed by David Isenberg of Babson College, the article defends the idea of how human capital and cultural domains are at the core of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. It argues that the human capital and cultural domains are at the center of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Their nature and the quality of the interactions between them, and in relation to the other surrounding domains, are responsible for generating or failing to generate the desired durable enterprise. The article concludes by proposing to update the Isenberg formulation for application in the Latin American context and advance in the conceptualization of durable entrepreneurial ecosystems that actively link education, enterprise and innovation using a new approach that must be created by all.

This article is a topical review that aims to show how Medellín (Colombia) has been advancing in projects and processes associated with innovation to the point of becoming a national and Latin American point of reference. The topic of innovation has been widely studied and enriched based on contributions by neoclassicists, with Shumpeter and the evolutionists Nelson, Winter, Lundvall and Freeman, among others. The term innovation is approached conceptually, from the conventional perspective of innovation derived from the classics and near classics, as well as the evolutionist approach to innovation and its relationship to the systemic approach, from which to derive the concepts of national and regional innovation systems. Finally, a general characterization is made of the actions that have enabled Medellín to become a regional innovation system led by the state sector, which has distinguished itself in the worldwide context to the point of the city being characterized as an innovation capital in the Latin American context.

This article is a case report on the program entitled “Innovation and Enterprise” (“Innova y Emprende”), a permanent extension project at the Engineering Faculty of the Universidad Fasta. In this program, a series of workshops was held with the education community. One such workshop was called “Little Big Dreamers” (“Pequeños Grandes Soñadores”) and was held in Mar del Plata, Argentina, from March to September 2014. The objective was to empower fifth and sixth grade secondary students at Basic Middle School N° 45 to encourage them to dream and plan their futures. Technology was employed as the facilitating medium for realizing their dreams. The students learned to design their own presentations using Scratch (a programming language for children and adolescents) to develop computational thinking and creativity; they created characters according to their own personal image and incorporated rap music with rhythm and lyrics to express their way of seeing the world. The results obtained through this project helped to awaken the curiosity of the participating adolescents, to develop the necessary abilities for enterprise and find the needed enthusiasm to successfully finish the project.

This article is the product of the research work entitled “Study of the Profile of Entrepreneurs at the Bogotá campus of the Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia” (“Estudio de perfil del emprendedor de la Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia, sede Bogotá”). In 2012, the Induspymes research group analyzed perceptions about the development of entrepreneurialabilities among members of the academic and student community at the engineering faculty at the Bogotá campus, from the gender perspective. The simple consisted of 502 members of the academic community (professors and students). A survey was designed and the data was analysed with a significance level of 0.01, 4 degrees of freedom, and a critical value of 13,27. The data obtained were analyzed to determine if there were differences between entrepreneurial abilities among men and women. The most relevant findings include the existence of differences associated with the tendency among men to assume risks and in handling frustration. However, women perform better in the commercial capacity and in terms of self-esteem. It was concluded that women are better at communicating ideas and relating to others. It was also found that superior performance among the masculine population may be associated with cultural aspects stemming from the social functions that our culture attributes to men and women, and their different roles in the family.

This research article is a product of the Strategic Plan of Buenos Aires (Plan Estratégico de Buenos Aires, pepba 2020), which consists of a working proposal with local businessmen and entrepreneurs so that, based on business ideas and opportunities detected in the value chains of strategic productive sectors, ideas for projects can be formulated and presented to fill those technological demands and needs. This article describes one such project: “unidea Cycle: Ideas and Opportunities for Entrepreneurship”. The objective of the project was to get the participants (entrepreneurs and young businessmen) to formulate projects that would help to channel demands that signify valuable business opportunities. The methodology consisted in involving businessmen from diverse productive sectors of the city, who presented the demands and needs observed in their companies, while specialists in the study and analysis of the local productive sphere described the characteristics of the value chains. The most representative result was that the participating businessmen and entrepreneurs are expressing interest in strengthening a way of creating a space focused on innovation.

Given the difficulty of applauding scientific-technological progress without restriction, the exploration of one or another understanding of technology becomes necessary. The accelerated development and permanent eruption of new technologies, along with the vertiginous renewal of technological artifacts, platforms and systems, pose increasingly greater challenges in the field of decision making. Social changes in the industrialized countries have led certain social collectives to understand that decisions about technology must not be exclusively left to experts and are intrinsically social. In this review article, the implications of technology on society are analyzed; more specifically, the relationship between progress and technology and the difference between technology and technique. Subsequently, the role of technology in society is discussed; the way in which decontextualized use of technology is risky for society and human beings is addressed and the idea of a society able to understand the interweaving between technology and humanity is expressed. Undoubtedly we must ask ourselves certain questions, namely, what could our role be in the creation of this technological future? And what new forms of human identity, political organization, community, and citizen participation arise from the technologies developed?

This article analyzes how academic training at the engineering faculties at most Iberian-American universities is monodisciplinary, in other words, specialized in a particular technological branch, while neglecting the learning of social abilities that are basic for leadership, visionary and innovative spirits and the attitudes and aptitudes that make for good businesses. While entrepreneurial training is a topic found throughout the educational community at all levels of teaching, this does not mean that academic thinking about the difference between teaching and learning to create an enterprise should be left out. The article includes proposals to improve the quality of entrepreneurial education in engineering programs and summarizes such concepts as open source learning, flipped classroom and personal learning environment (ple). A renovation of didactic strategies is proposed for application in engineering classrooms of the components for learning to create an enterprise with open source code. Teachers must therefore deal with the risks implicit in such challenges in order to build instructional designs in which students learn and create enterprises through their own interests.