Fusing Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship into Postgraduate Education

For many years entrepreneurship education was mostly integrated within the academic fields of business and management. Recently though, entrepreneurship education has expanded the boundaries of purely business education to other specialised sectors such as technology and science, promoting thus the need of introducing the teaching of entrepreneurship in non-business environments. Nevertheless, most higher education institutions still provide entrepreneurship education in a business programme context. This limitation requires appropriate addressing since it creates and maintains a gap in relation to the effective knowledge transfer from the academia to the industry. The numerous challenges of infusing interdisciplinary entrepreneurial capabilities to postgraduate students must be tackled through well established mechanisms, especially for executive mode (one long weekend per month) programmes of study. Such mechanisms include constant curriculum development, effective quality assurance methods, innovative and flexible programme delivery and assessment models, and finally, proficiency on educational technologies that can assist all previously mentioned aspects, but can also enhance the students’ learning experience. Within this context, this paper presents an interdisciplinary postgraduate programme that aims to instill and develop the habits of a mind characteristic of entrepreneurial thinking to non-business students: the MSc in Business Management and Technology. The programme is innovative and unique in its mode of delivery, quality assurance mechanisms and other core teaching and learning and administration aspects which are presented in detail. Finally, we debate on the effectiveness and efficiency of the programme by analysing the feedback from our students