Stimulating students’ engagement in mathematics courses in non-STEM academic programmes: A game-based learning

It is of utmost importance to innovate in current teaching practices at higher education in order to enhance learners’ involvement, comprehension, cooperation and motivation. In non-STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) programmes, students tend to display a negative attitude towards mathematic-related courses. Aiming at overcoming this, game-based learning is regarded as a potential means of improving students’ confidence and increasing their motivation. In this study we propose a teamwork activity inspired by gamebased learning, presented in the form of a competition. To test the suitability of the activity, we report its implementation in the subject of Mathematics 1, taught as part of the Business Administration Degree at Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (Spain). We hope that the underlying idea of the activity as well as the encouraging results obtained stimulate lecturers to implement game-based learning activities in their courses.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Making the learning of mathematics meaningful: An active learning experience for business students

Mathematics is presented in non-STEM disciplines as a subject that helps students acquire tools they will need in their future careers. Therefore, the need for instruction in mathematics demands content, oriented not only towards fundamental principles and techniques, but also towards their application in a specific context. By directing the teaching in this sense, students are able to recognise the relevance of mathematics and the possibilities that this subject offers. The purpose of this paper is thus to propose a methodology for making the learning of mathematics meaningful for non-STEM students. We illustrate its implementation by presenting an activity that requires business university students to search for economic applications of the concepts learned in a course of mathematics. As students’ involvement is envisaged, the activity incorporates an active learning methodology that aims to promote the acquisition of hard and soft skills. Results obtained from its application are reported and discussed.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Enhancing business students’ skills through a cross-curricular activity

[EN] This paper describes the experience of a cross-curricular activity that combines mathematical knowledge with several soft skills, namely the use of new technologies, teamwork and critical thinking. Two different subjects are involved, Mathematics 2 and Information Systems, both part of the Bachelor’s Degree in Business and Administration, taught at Universitat Internacional de Catalunya. 42 students participated in this pilot activity during the second semester of the academic year 2015/2016. Results indicate that students considered the activity useful and that it helped improve their knowledge on information systems and the fundamental concepts covered in Mathematics. Data gathered also reveal that students positively valued the idea of applying concepts of one subject into other subjects. As for the development of soft skills, students converge in that the activity helped them developing interpersonal skills and being more critical with one’s work.Gil-Doménech, D.; Berbegal-Mirabent, J.; Borsot, G. (2017). Enhancing business students’ skills through a cross-curricular activity. En Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Higher Education Advances. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 284-292. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD17.2017.517128429

Coopetition strategies of start-ups: evidence from a Spanish regional innovation system

Start-ups operate in a highly competitive environment, surrounded by companies that offer similar products and services. In this context, collaboration between competitors has been found to help companies reduce risk and share costs, resources and expertise. Despite its relevance, coopetition (i.e. the simultaneous pursuit of cooperation and competition) in entrepreneurship has attracted little scholarly attention. This study aims at filling this theoretical and empirical gap by exploring the impact of coopetition on the performance of start-ups. Drawing on the existing literature, this study also considers innovation and knowledge sharing as key factors that can shape business performance. The analysis is based on qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) because the focus is on the combined effect of the determinants of firm performance rather than their net effects. This approach enables identification of different start-up strategies. The results indicate that coopetition and innovation are important to positively influence market performance. However, knowledge sharing is only relevant when coopeting start-ups either have solid market experience or are highly innovative.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Análisis del caos en series temporales financieras vía el estudio de atractores

[spa] La tesis consiste en la proposición de una metodología para la búsqueda de caos vía el análisis de atractores, con el objetivo de determinar si diversas series financieras presentan comportamientos caóticos. El estudio se realiza mediante la aplicación de algoritmos que testan las propiedades del caos en series temporales. La teoría del caos permite atribuir reglas deterministas a fenómenos aparentemente aleatorios. Gracias al determinismo inherente a los sistemas caóticos es posible, dentro de un cierto rango, hacer predicciones sobre su comportamiento a corto plazo. Sin embargo, esta predictibilidad desaparece a medio y largo plazo, dado que una de las características principales de los sistemas caóticos es su sensibilidad a las condiciones iniciales, por la cual una pequeña modificación de estas condiciones produce importantes cambios en el sistema con el paso del tiempo. De lo anterior se deriva la importancia que tiene la búsqueda de caos en los mercados financieros, ya que el paso de una concepción de mercado aleatoria a una caótica justificaría el uso de técnicas de previsión a corto plazo. Un sistema caótico se caracteriza por tener órbitas densas, ser topológicamente transitivo y ser sensible a las condiciones iniciales. Las dos primeras características implican la presencia de un atractor, esto es, una zona del espacio hacia la que tienden las trayectorias del sistema. Por su parte, la sensibilidad a las condiciones iniciales hace que las trayectorias se muevan de un modo impredecible a medio y a largo plazo dentro del atractor, y que este pueda calificarse de caótico. Así, dado que un sistema se considera caótico si presenta un atractor caótico, en la tesis se estudia el sistema financiero desde una perspectiva caótica, y para ello se propone una metodología que pretende analizar la presencia de este tipo de atractor en series temporales, y que consiste en la aplicación de algoritmos que testan las características de los sistemas caóticos. Para detectar la presencia de órbitas densas el algoritmo propuesto se basa en el “test de diferencias cercanas”. La transitividad topológica se analiza a través de un algoritmo propio. Por último, el algoritmo usado para testar la sensibilidad a las condiciones iniciales se basa en el estudio de los valores propios de la matriz de cambio de estado.[eng] The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the chaotic analysis of financial time series, providing a comprehensive methodology based on the characteristics of chaotic systems. Through the application of chaos theory, deterministic rules can be attributed to seemingly random phenomena. The determinism inherent in chaotic systems makes it possible to forecast the short-term behaviour of these systems within a certain range. However, over the longer term, this predictability disappears since one of the main characteristics of chaotic systems is their sensitivity to initial conditions. This sensitivity means that any small alteration to the system’s initial conditions causes significant changes over time. In this lies the importance of searching for chaos in financial markets, because a change from the conceptualisation of a random market to that of a chaotic one would justify the use of forecasting techniques in the short term. The mathematical definition of chaos provides the characteristics that can be used as prerequisites of chaotic behaviour. These are: sensitivity to initial conditions, the presence of dense orbits and topological transitivity. The latter two characteristics imply the presence of an attractor, an area in space towards which the trajectories of the system tend. Sensitivity to initial conditions causes these trajectories to move unpredictably within the attractor and this allows the system to be classified as chaotic. There are various instruments to test sensitivity to initial conditions and the existence of a dense orbit. In relation to the property of topological transitivity, a commonly accepted test for determining whether a system is topologically transitive has not yet been found. This failure constitutes a major limitation in the study of the chaotic dynamics of series of observations, as the lack of such a test prevents one of the properties of chaotic systems from being tested. In this thesis I therefore propose an algorithm to distinguish whether a system is topologically transitive from a series of observations of it, and this constitutes its major contribution

Improving business plan development and entrepreneurial skills through a project-based activity

The present study reports the experience of a project-based activity similar to the ones developed by the Small Business Institute (SBI) program in which students are asked to plan an event. It is part of a Project Management course taught at Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, in an Undergraduate course in Business Administration. The activity has been designed in such a way that it is expected to help students develop technical and entrepreneurial skills as it requires the use of critical thinking, quantitative methods and tools to interpret data for decision-making. The results show that active learning materialized in the form of project-based activities make courses more enjoyable for both instructors and students, and most importantly, contribute to develop students’ skills such as teamwork and critical thinking. However, while it is useful for students to gain some exposure to the material through pre-class readings and overview lectures, students do not fully understand and realize about their importance until they actively take part and reflect on the meaning of what they are learning.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Teaching agile methodologies in a project management course

[EN] The increasingly dynamic, competitive and volatile business environment that characterizes today’s marketplace demands for rapid delivery of high-quality outcomes, aligning development with customer needs and company goals. Agile methodologies have gained widespread popularity due to their easy implementation and adaptability to different industrial contexts. Although these methodologies originally emerged in the software and computer science field, they have been rapidly imported to other disciplines such as management and business. This paper describes an activity developed in a Project Management course during the academic year 2016/17. The activity is designed with the objective of not only teaching students agile methodologies (and scrum in particular), but also to allow them understand the basis of such methodologies by implementing a class project. The activity details as well as students’ perceptions are analyzed and discussed. The feedback collected indicates that students positively valued the activity and that they believe that through this activity they have been able to learn the fundamentals of agile methodologies.Berbegal-Mirabent, J.; Gil-Doménech, D.; Berbegal-Mirabent, N. (2017). Teaching agile methodologies in a project management course. En Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Higher Education Advances. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 312-320. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD17.2017.5181OCS31232

Challenging students to develop work-based skills: A PBL experience

[ES] In today’s changing world the skills and habilities required for getting a job are rapidly changing. New trends such as globalization, data science, artificial intelligence and the never ending expansion of information and technology communications are changing the demands of the labour market. Accordingly, new skills are needed in order to succeed and get a job. As noted by the OECD, educators’ challenge lies in helping students develop their unique capacity to create, innovate and add value, skills that distinguish humans from machines. With this aim in mind, this study reports the results of a challenge-based activity (based on project-based learning) targeted to undergraduate students in Business Administration. The results reveal a positive impact of the methodologies on students’ learning process, their satisfaction and a positive improvement on a series of skills, namely teamwork, writting and oral skills, digital skills, capacity to identify and solve problems, capacity to work autonomously, analytical capacity and capacity to think criticallyManresa Matas, A.; Berbegal-Mirabent, J.; Gil-Domenech, D. (2020). Challenging students to develop work-based skills: A PBL experience. En 6th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd'20). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. (30-05-2020):561-568. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAd20.2020.11108OCS56156830-05-202

Where to locate? A project-based learning activity for a graduate-level course on operations management

Location decisions represent an integral part of the strategic planning process of firms. Because these decisions do have a significant impact on the organisation, location analysis is a recurrent topic in operations management courses. In this study we posit that students enrolled in such courses should experience in an active way location decisions. To this end, this paper proposes an activity that, by adopting a student-centred approach, allows students getting involved in location decisions (technical skill) while simultaneously helps them boosting some of the soft skills that operation managers should possess (teamwork and use of new technologies). By mimicking a real life situation, students are asked to decide where to locate a specific new public service in the city of Barcelona. This activity was part of a course on Operations Management, included in the Master’s Degree in Engineering Management and Production Systems taught at Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (Barcelona, Spain).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Fostering university-industry collaborations through university teaching

Unversity-industry links and their impact on innovation processes have been widely acknowledged. However, previous studies have mainly examined university-industry knowledge transfer activities from the perspective of the research and third stream missions. This paper goes a step further, analysing such processes from the perspective of the university’s teaching mission. More specifically, it explores how educational crowdsourcing platforms help bring universities and industry together to develop joint activities in undergraduate and graduate programmes. Nine platforms with different business models were examined. A qualitative exploratory approach was adopted to manually collect and analyse data from the platforms. This study identified three categories of educational crowdsourcing platforms based on their focus (education, crowdsourcing or networking). The analysis shows that, although these platforms have some shortcomings, they provide benefits to all stakeholders by facilitating experiential learning, promoting skills acquisition and encouraging the development of new ideas to meet industry needs.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft