Os estudantes de engenharia e as suas intenções empreendedoras

No ambiente atual a promoção do empreendedorismo é uma oportunidade chave, e o ensino da engenharia tem reconhecido a sua relevância ao incluir nos seus currículos disciplinas básicas relacionadas com as áreas financeiras. Na situação econômica atual, fornecer ao futuro engenheiro conceitos e técnicas, que lhe permita passar do conhecimento para a ação, é indispensável para melhorar a compreensão do valor do empreendedorismo como uma alternativa de empregabilidade em detrimento de outras opções. O objetivo deste trabalho é o de apresentar os resultados preliminares da pesquisa ENGEmpreende desenvolvida para analisar as atitudes percebidas e os valores associados ao empreendedorismo por parte dos estudantes de engenharia. A amostra envolveu 387 estudantes dos cursos de engenharia da Universidade do Minho, em Portugal. Os estudantes de engenharia portugueses revelaram que têm uma boa opinião sobre o empreendedorismo. Este estudo também mostrou que a predisposição empreendedora dos estudantes inquiridos tem relações de dependência com o gênero, o conceito sobre empreendedorismo e o comportamento empreendedor. Os resultados sobre a imagem percebida do empresário sugerem que os estudantes reconhecem que o empreendedor tem uma imagem positiva na sociedade, mas têm dúvidas sobre o que é melhor: ser empresário ou ser um empregado numa grande empresa. Como barreiras, os estudantes de engenharia apresentam uma dificuldade em encontrar uma ideia de negócio ou como obter acesso a capitais de investimento através de empréstimos bancários. As capacidades e competências percebidas dos estudantes sugerem uma elevada adaptabilidade, confiança, confiança técnica e orientação para os resultados. Pretende-se com os resultados obtidos, por meio do questionário ENGEmpreende, contribuir para o tema de intenções empreendedoras de estudantes de engenharia, a fim de identificar as atitudes empreendedoras, predisposição para o autoemprego, imagem empresarial, obstáculos que interferem ao espírito empresarial, conhecimento sobre os riscos e confiança técnic

Institutional support program for entrepreneurship : the experience of the University of Minho

Entrepreneurship has a significant effect in promoting innovation, productivity, creating employment opportunities and economic development of a country. In many countries has been made a significant effort to promote entrepreneurship. An entrepreneur is someone who is able to develop new products and services, taking risks and identifying opportunities. The university programs have one important role in identifying business opportunities and support during the entrepreneurial process. Since Portugal has been particularly affected by the current crisis, with particular focus on the country's unemployment rate and economic operating conditions, which impact can have an academic initiative like the TecMinho’s IdeaLab of University of Minho? Since 2009, the University of Minho has in operation a business ideas laboratory, the TecMinho’s IdeaLab, which supports the generation and development of technology-based and / or knowledge intensive business ideas. Having already completed eight editions, it is intended to support students and graduates of the University of Minho from any scientific area. In addition to testing the commercial potential of the ideas presented, evaluates the vocation and entrepreneurial skills of the participants through the various stages of the program. Besides presenting and discussing the results over time, the paper complements the analysis with a case study of participants and ideas that were selected to initiate the TecMinho’s IdeaLab workshop phase. Since its foundation, the TecMinho’s IdeaLab has supported the development of 126 business ideas and enabled for 291 entrepreneurs the acquisition of knowledge and skills in business development and business creation, regardless their training areas. In addition to the individual characteristics and skills of participants, we analyze the characteristics of the ideas presented, in order to contribute for the understanding of the evolution of the program. The presented results make a contribution in the Portuguese academic entrepreneurship theme and in particular in the University of Minho case

Entrepreneurial intentions of engineering students

Promoting entrepreneurship is a key opportunity in the current environment, and engineering have recognized this criticism by including in their curricula basic financial disciplines. Given the current economic situation, provide the future engineer with concepts and techniques to move from knowledge to action, can improve the value perception of entrepreneurship as an alternative to employability on behalf of others. The aim of this paper is to present the preliminary results of the ENGEmpreende survey developed to measure the perceived attitudes and values of entrepreneurship by engineering students. Our sample involves 387 students of engineering courses from University of Minho with no experience in entrepreneurial courses, divided into undergraduate (78.55%) or master's degree students in engineering (21.45%). Portuguese engineering students report good levels of thoughts about entrepreneurship. Our study also found that their entrepreneurship predisposition has dependency relationships with gender, thoughts about entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial activities. The results of the perceived image of the entrepreneur suggest that students recognize the positive image of the entrepreneur in society, but have doubts about what is best: entrepreneur or employee in a large company? As perceived barriers, engineering students perceive as difficult to find a business idea or access to bank loans. Students’ perceived skills and competence suggest a perceived high adaptability, perseverance, technical confidence and orientation to results. The results of ENGEmpreende survey give an additional contribution to the theme of engineering entrepreneurship intentions through the identification of entrepreneurship predisposition, attitude to self-employment, entrepreneurial image, barriers to entrepreneurship, risk perception and technical confidence. We identified differences explained by factors such gender and thoughts about entrepreneurship.FEDER Funds through the Operational Programme Competitiveness Factors – COMPETE, and National Funds through FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology under the Projects FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-022674 and Pest-OE/EME/UI0252/201

Processamento de imagem digital com MatLab : uma aplicação em ambiente industrial

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Entrepreneurial intention : a study with MIEGI students

In the actual complex economic context, entrepreneurship is seen as a hope and an alternative to the crisis, reducing poverty and creating new jobs. Understanding entrepreneurial intentions is the key to predict, enhance and foster entrepreneurship. However, it is a hard task to really understand and predict these intentions, given the fact that they are related to many variables as personal traits, family influence, self-efficacy, social background, and others. Regarding this, there is a well-known model, the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991), that enables accurate outcomes predicting the entrepreneurial intentions, and consequently the entrepreneurial behavior. The aim of this paper is to explain the entrepreneurial intentions using the Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior. This was done by a survey developed to measure attitude towards the behavior, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control and self-efficacy in students of industrial engineering and management (MIEGI) from University of Minho

Entrepreneurial attitudes and entrepreneurship’s potential in East Timor

Entrepreneurship has been recognized as a critical factor in promoting innovation, productivity, creating employment opportunities and economic development of a country. Entrepreneurship is defined as the process of creating something new with value by devoting the necessary time and effort, assuming the financial risks, psychological and social correspondents, and the consequences of getting satisfaction and independence (Hisrich et al, 2009). In the current environment it is important for a young country like East Timor to promote entrepreneurship as a key opportunity, in order to increase the number of individuals with individual initiative, i.e. entrepreneurs who take responsibility for economic development and job creation for the working population. But, since this is a new social and political challenge, are the East Timorese really sensitive and receptive to the idea of become entrepreneurs? The present study aims to understand the attitudes and values of the East Timorese students in relation to entrepreneurship. Taking as a starting point a survey set to study the potential of entrepreneurship among university students in East Timor, the paper presents and discusses the results obtained on various issues such as entrepreneurial intention, predisposition, risk disposition, and personality traits and skills. Our sample involves 140 students from National University of Timor Lorosa’e with no experience in entrepreneurial courses, divided into engineering students and economics students. East Timorese students report good entrepreneurial intentions but when asked to choose one investment option they hesitate between invest in an own business or invest in an investment fund. The risk disposition of students was measured through an index of entrepreneur risk disposition and results indicated good levels of risk disposition. East Timorese students present high levels of self-efficacy, endurance and autonomy. They also report good perceived levels of technical skills but admitted lower perceived financial skills. During the analysis, several differences were identified concerning students’ gender, course or having self-employed parents. The study indicated a high entrepreneur potential among East Timorese university students and the results give an important contribution to the theme of Entrepreneurship in East Timor. The results presented are preliminary and require more careful analysis

Materiais para o Fim do Mundo 3

Para estudar o imaginário do fim do mundo, o Instituto de Literatura Comparada Margarida Losa organiza, desde 2013, uma série de seminários abertos, coincidindo com os equinócios e os solstícios. Os libretos Materiais para o Fim do Mundo recolhem alguns ensaios apresentados nesses seminários, ou textos afins. Neste terceiro libreto, Isabel Cristina Rodrigues interroga o limite do testemunhável nas palavras de Marguerite Duras e nas imagens de Alain Resnais, em Hiroshima Mon Amour; Paulo Alexandre Pereira estuda o imaginário do apocalipse na poesia de Tomaz Kim, num século ferido pela guerra e pela wasteland; e Raquel S. lê Finisterra de Carlos de Oliveira e Beginning to End de Samuel Beckett, questionando os conceitos de mundo, de fim e da linguagem (im)possível depois do fim

Analysing students' attitudes towards the learning of specialized software

In this article the situation of teaching in engineering courses using specialized software support is evaluated and analysed.The statistics courses in engineering often come off as element of formal exposure to statistical analysis and research methods. The software support during classes intends to facilitate and reinforce learning with computational resolution of statistical specific problems. We report a research that investigates students' attitudes towards computers and their effect on statistics unit performance. The preliminary results of research using a small sample of 47 students enrolled in the experimental statistics unit of the 1st year of the master's degree in industrial engineering from the University of Minho indicate that software perceived usefulness has a positive effect on student success, although perceived ease of use and perceived self-performance do not influence.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT