EHIS Method©: Entrepreneurship human interaction skills

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to describe the EHIS Method© (Entrepreneurship Human Interactions Skills), an innovative entrepreneurship teaching and learning method developed and used at the Entrepreneurship course at Portucalense University (UPT), a private higher education institution in Portugal. EHIS Method© draws on insights from the recent literature on entrepreneurship education and is applied to teach Entrepreneurship in several study programs at UPT, such as Psychology, Social Education, Tourism, Economics, Law, Management, Informatics, Management and Information Systems and Hospitality Management. The students are grouped into teams and challenged to develop an entrepreneurship project, which consists of four different steps: (1) the idea discovery/generation; (2) from the idea to the business model; (3) from the business model to the business plan; (4) from the business plan to the preparation of the application to the Net UPT (business incubator of UPT). Throughout the EHIS Method©, students have to successfully go through a variety of assessment elements, held at different times, encompassing different activities and skills and involving different types of evaluators: (a) teachers/mentors; (b) university professors and (c) potential investors.