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Brazilian educational background

23 July, 2015 - 14:35

The Brazilian reality shows that about 90% of domestic entrepreneurs do not engage in educational activities in higher education related to business venture 1. Most Brazilian entrepreneurs seek other organisations and institutions outside the universities to develop and guide their entrepreneurial skills, such as trade associations, chambers of commerce, industry associations, Brazilian Service of Support for Micro and Small Enterprises (SEBRAE), National Commercial Apprenticeship Service (SENAC), National Industrial Apprenticeship Service (SENAI) and Commerce Social Service (SESC).

Cultural specificities and diversities confer to Brazil its unique trait. Today, micro and small enterprises (MSEs) represent 99.2% of the Brazilian business sector with 4.9 million formal businesses, which accounts for 20% of the GDP and employs 56.1% of the formal labor force, and 9.5 million informal businesses, for a total of 14.5 million businesses 2. Brazil is already recognized as a country of opportunities, with intra-entrepreneur, who design and innovate within their work environment or, as new entrepreneurs, by creating their own business through an extension of their current work (Spin-off), either through the assistance and support of a business incubator, as new technological entrepreneur or as a manager of a small business 3.

In an educational context, Brazil faces severe difficulties in proposing quality solutions to entrepreneurs with high level of potential. Today, the Brazilian educational system counts for more than 1,500 institutions of higher education 4, which enhance the development of skilled professionals able to generate new projects and ventures, specifically those involving high technology. However, the low level of higher education in the country, combined with the traditionalist educational model of the leading universities, create realities that are clearly deficient in their ability to lead students to an entrepreneurial reality. Both universities and vocational courses, such as technical colleges, are geared towards the formation of a job applicant and do not to develop entrepreneurial skills and potential, through initiative and creativity 5.

Moreover, an inconsistency in research and development occurs between the expenses of research institutions and business needs. Most researches have kept a historical distance from the needs of the population, which creates a lack of knowledge for the entrepreneurs, limiting their ability to develop their products in a competitive market.

Thus, the scenario of entrepreneurial education demonstrates the low level of ability of the national educational institutions to adapt their curricula to the changing needs of the labor force 6. Entrepreneurship education enhances training that focus on the individual who may be interested in an opportunity or either for whom is in a prior stage before creating a new venture 7. It is also relevant for whom who are already in the process of developing a project and even for those who are concerned about their strategies to stay active or expand the business. The inclusion of entrepreneurship education in Brazil is recent. It is in the 80s that it emerged at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, with the development of a New Business Venture discipline in the Business Administration course and in the technology related disciplines, from a market pressure and the growing importance of the Brazilian micro and small business. The main initiatives in support to entrepreneurship education in Brazil are known by the scientific community as Instituto ENDEAVOUR and Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV). Instituto Endeavour is a private organization, headquartered in the United States, which stimulates the mobilization of public and private organizations in the sharing of tacit knowledge through its network, strengthening the entrepreneurial culture in Brazil. One case is the consolidation of a digital platform that enables educators in entrepreneurship and innovation, which provides educational content for the Brazilian professors, named Educação Empreendedora Brasil. The other initiative is with the FGV and its Center for Entrepreneurship and New Business, whose mission is to build a culture of entrepreneurship. Among the main projects of the Center is a participation in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report, in which the FGV act as an institutional partner of the Brazilian Institute for Quality and Productivity (IBQP), enriching the content of research with scholarly analysis and business plan competitions 8.

However, the logic of teaching, nevertheless its structure or pedagogical strategy, still presents “closed model” obstacles that follow an “informative” path instead of a “training” one, giving no incentive to a student to analyze and learn to be “pragmatically critical”, with the ability to understand the organisation contexts as a whole through the use of flexible mental models and tools 9. Since it is understood that the search for new strategies and pedagogical alternatives capable of meeting the demands from the turbulent market becomes necessary to attain the expectations of the student in the evolution of the practice of entrepreneurship education, their education related terms, such as techniques, methods and procedures do represent an “application of the available means in order to achieve their goals” 10.

In a Brazilian perspective, the education institutions still compartmentalize the areas of knowledge for the purpose of teaching, even though some key Brazilian authors have already introduced thoughts and means that could allow such transformation 11, 12, 13, 14. Such type of education would require training focused on a local social perspective, which includes the necessary skills to solve local organizational problems. Any learning strategy of entrepreneurship education requires the development of a more humanistic approach, based on a systemic perspective, which includes the involvement of the levels of a local community. It could either integrate established education schemes and strategies created by real institutional reforms, but it must keep in mind the necessity to stimulate the understanding of the conduct of a business development process, once organized and committed to a common local objective, the transformation of the student’s mind to an engine of pro-activeness.

Consequently, there is a need to broaden these horizons of research, which involves themes and experiences of the local Brazilian entrepreneurs mixed with rigorous consolidated administrative contents.