by Mercedes Pérez Millán

Abstract: The Centre for Entrepreneurship at the Universidad Loyola is using the HEInnovate self-assessment and action cards to improve awareness at the university about their activities, find new ways of measuring impact, and build an Entrepreneurship Committee.

What is your role, and how does your institution support entrepreneurship?

I am Mercedes Pérez Millán, and I am the Director of the Centre for Entrepreneurship at the Universidad Loyola in Spain. The Universidad Loyola is a private university in southern Spain with about 6,000 undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students. Their Centre for Entrepreneurship (a team of three people) works across all faculties at the university. The Centre holds an annual Entrepreneurship Week, which invites entrepreneurs, investors, and other stakeholders in the business world to speak in classrooms. They also help students develop their business ideas, match them up with specific mentors who can aid in this process, and raise awareness about entrepreneurship in the student population overall.  The Centre for Entrepreneurship also fosters relationships with and connects university students to external stakeholders. They work with start-ups outside the university and facilitate internships at these start-ups for their students to take part in. They also host a summer camp, which brings students to visit incubators, accelerators, and investors in the local communities to get an idea of how they could develop their business ideas in the future.

What led to your first encounter with the HEInnovate tool?

I first became aware of HEInnovate while submitting a response to the EIT HEI Initiative Call for Proposals in 2022. Completing the HEInnovate self-assessment was necessary for submitting an application, so I arranged the participation for a variety of 15 stakeholders at Universidad Loyola, including faculty members, representatives from the management team, researchers, professors, and students.

Were there any surprising insights or discoveries?

It was quite interesting to see the views of stakeholders at the university. I noticed that not many people at the university knew about the activities that the Centre for Entrepreneurship facilitates. Therefore, I worked to better promote these activities through word-of-mouth, involving more professors and management team members in these activities, and giving students more decision-making power in planning future activities. 

What motivated you to attend the HEInnovate Train the Trainers event, and what did you take away from the experience?

Because I was particularly interested in the Impact of the Entrepreneurial HEI dimension, I attended the Train the Trainers in Brussels in May of 2024. My feeling was that measuring impact was important for communication with management, and I hoped the training would reveal some strategies for best doing so. At the training, I met another participant who had the same goal. The fellow participant shared with me their strategy of using the results about their university from the Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey (GUESSS) to measure impact. I took inspiration from this fellow participant, and I am now also incorporating the results about Universidad Loyola from the GUESSS survey to measure impact and share this with senior management. Luckily, I also met other participants at Train the Trainers, with whom I am still connected: I submitted another response to the EIT HEI Initiative Call for Proposals 2024 with a fellow participant from Portugal. Also, I shared the materials for a training I had previously arranged at Universidad Loyola with another Train the Trainers participant in Greece, who was interested in holding a similar training at their higher education institution.

What were the most useful or beneficial aspects of participating in the HEInnovate – Train the Trainers?

At the Train the Trainers, I found the use of the action cards particularly interesting, and I have used them in my team’s yearly planning to plot short-term and medium-term activities. My team had already been planning activities such as establishing an Entrepreneurship Committee with stakeholders from start-ups in the local community. When we saw that the action cards also laid out the importance of conducting activities such as this in order to become more innovative and entrepreneurial, we found this quite validating and confidence-boosting. We have since begun establishing the Entrepreneurship Committee internally, and it was this Committee which organised the Entrepreneurship Week. We have plans to soon invite external stakeholders.

Are there any plans to continue or expand your work based on what you have learned?

The action plan I created at Train the Trainers revolved around encouraging the new senior management team at Universidad Loyola to complete the HEInnovate self-assessment, analyse the results, and work with them to action-plan, using those results. Going forward, I plan to do this before the end of the year 2024.