Entrepreneurship education has generated considerable interest in recent decades, largely attributable to the evidence of the positive impact of small and medium-sized enterprises on economic growth, job creation, innovation and wealth generation. Since the first entrepreneurship course was held in 1947 at Harvard University, countless courses and programmes have been developed and implemented throughout the world. Nevertheless, there is still much discussion about the scope, objectives and methodologies that are most appropriate for the promotion of an entrepreneurial mindset. This article addresses the suitability of ‘design thinking’ as a teaching approach in entrepreneurship education by using case study research methodology. During the academic year 2012/13, a new one-semester curricular unit was offered to 66 undergraduate students across five courses, using a teaching methodology adapted from the design thinking process. Students’ assessments of the unit were elicited through a questionnaire at the end of the semester. The findings suggest that design thinking had a positive influence on their motivation and their satisfaction with their overall performance.

Market orientation has been presented as an important predictor of business performance, and it is presumed to contribute to long-term success in both profit-oriented and non-profit enterprises. Similarly, entrepreneurial orientation is a concept that has been widely applied to business firms but has not been empirically tested in social enterprises. Moreover, the literature does not present a widely accepted and tested conceptual model relating entrepreneurial orientation, market orientation and performance, in the realm of social enterprises. In order to fill this gap, this research assesses how these strategic orientations affect social and economic performance in the setting of social enterprises. Structural equation modeling was used as a means to analyze the hypothesized relationships. After testing the model on a sample of 805 Portuguese social enterprises, the findings show that both social entrepreneurship and market orientations significantly impact social performance. The results also indicate that market orientation mediates the effect of social entrepreneurship orientation on the performance of social enterprises.

The study aims at investigating the main challenges in University-Industry Technology Transfer (UITT) process, as well as the relevant factors for the successful licensing of university inventions. We interviewed academic inventors of several patents in force, owned by Portuguese public universities. We evaluated the process of patent development considering three phases: research, protection and commercialisation. We observed that most of the patents resulted from master/doctoral research and were developed by small, departmental or interdepartmental work teams without industry collaboration. The main motivations were related to curricular valorisation (prestige/visibility/reputation), potential of commercialisation, and/or university incentives. Inflexibility in university procedures and in negotiating with industry; lack of R&D funding to further develop the technology suitable for marketing; and low market potential of the patent were the most cited barriers. The collaboration with industry seems beneficial in the three phases of the UITT process, and its involvement contributed to diminish several of the barriers identified in the UITT process.