ICT entrepreneurial ecosystem for engineering education

© 2016 TEMPUS Publications. Entrepreneurship is a powerful route to integrating skilled people into the working market. However, its teaching is particularly weak in engineering degree programmes. The objective of this innovative action has been to develop an entrepreneurial ecosystem to improve ICT entrepreneurial skills at engineering universities of countries with weaker entrepreneurial tradition in new technologies.Anacceleration programme has been designed for engineering students with the objective of creating start-ups, going beyond the concept and becoming a start-up in early stage. Innovative methods have been applied to create and accelerate start-ups within an entrepreneurial ecosystem adapted to the university context. Four years of experience (2012-15) have allowed us to collect indicators and improving the proposed methods to scale up the model to the wider EU.Two hundred sixty-one students have participated in this experience and fifty-six start-ups have been created. Of those, thirty-eight have successfully finalized the programme.