The University of Antwerp (UAntwerp) has entrepreneurship as an explicit educational priority. It is a member of the Young Universities for the Future of Europe European University Alliance (YUFE). The University sees an urgent need to reform doctoral education to deliver more entrepreneurial graduates equipped with open science competences and to open new career opportunities for doctoral candidates. UAntwerp coordinated a European project entitled “Developing and Implementing hands-on training on Open Science and Open Innovation for Early Career Researchers” (DIOSI). In this project, together with partner universities, UAntwerp developed a concept for educating early-career researchers about entrepreneurship as well as sessions in which teachers can learn how to teach entrepreneurship. Key items of the concept are a non-academic mentor, training modules about the basics of innovation and entrepreneurship as well as a three-day train-the-trainer course. UAntwerp measures the short-term and long-term impact of the training modules on doctoral candidates. The DIOSI partner universities continue implementing the concept beyond the project funding. Several spin-off companies have emerged from doctoral research at UAntwerp, and the University expects that the number will continue to increase in the future.
Entrepreneurship education for doctoral candidates at the University of Antwerp, Belgium