How do students transform good solutions from an educational challenge in a startup? A case study to entrepreneurship education

Abstract

In many universities around the world several events of short term Pbl are taking place. These are challenges proposed to the engineering students from concrete problems given by NGOs, governmental institutions, or enterprises. In general, they are named hackathons or bootcamps. The goal is to spark interest and develop skills linked to the design and the engineering project development in short-time sprints. However, most of these solutions are never implemented in practice by the teams that created them. The universities consider these practices as part of the education in engineering. Two Brazilian institutions (CEFET/RJ-Federal Center for Engineering Education-Rio de Janeiro and UFRJ-Federal University of Rio de Janeiro - Brazil) participated and won the international event named "Invent for the Planet" organized by Texas A&M University in 2019. The students developed an interface for blind people to walk on the streets avoiding obstacles. Back in Brazil, these students patented the product and created a startup to produce and introduce that solution in the market. Today they have an accessibility startup with several other solutions in addition to the one created at the event. This research has the goal to understand the ways that made these students transform an educational project into a feasible/successful entrepreneurial action. What was the motivation of these students? Where did they get additional entrepreneurship training? What lessons does this case can provide to engineering education? A set of interviews has been carried out to understand the process that can contribute to engineering entrepreneurship education in the universities.