“Oscar of Education” awarded to Tec entrepreneurship degree program

Tec de Monterrey professors have won bronze at the QS Reimagine Education Awards, known as the “Oscars of Education,” held at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

They won this award in the Management Education category for redesigning the Tec’s Entrepreneurship Degree Program (LDE) through the “Entrepreneurship Program Innovation Project: The Experience Journey.”

This award was received by Ján Rehák, National Director of the Entrepreneurship Program, and Víctor Jiménez, Director of this degree program, on behalf of the Tec at the event organized by international ranking organization Quacquarelli Symonds, on December 7 and 8.

The project of redesigning the Entrepreneurship Degree Program

This announcement was made for the 2022 winners, in which 2 other Tec projects were also announced as winners.

The project of redesigning the Entrepreneurship Degree Program was led mainly by professors Ján Rehák and Romain Pouzou, from the Querétaro campus.

This project aims to go from traditional entrepreneurship class experiences to immersive experiences based on challenges with external partners and specialized mentors in various spaces (bootcamps and hackathons).

Their project encompassed 4 immersive challenge-based experiences: “DigiEduHack,” involving 53 universities from 33 countries; “ActInSpace”, with 6 universities in Mexico; “Global Entrepreneurship Summer School,” with 45 universities from around the world; and a Social Entrepreneurship Bootcamp held internally that has impacted more than 2,200 students.

The project mainly involved professors, designers, and department directors.

Innovations in the Entrepreneurship Degree Program

We worked on the redesign for around 3 years, said Víctor Jiménez, Director of LDE at the Querétaro campus, who was one of the project leaders.

“We built a challenge-based curriculum, in which students could create their own company from the moment they entered the program,” explained Jiménez.

“The Tec’s LDE program is immersed in a national entrepreneurial ecosystem that enables students to connect with each other, with academia, industry, and graduates,” added Rehák.

Jiménez said that mentors from the Eugenio Garza Lagüera Institute of Entrepreneurship were brought in, and sessions were held with graduates to advise them, as well as other activities.

“We’re working with training partners in the industry; there are workshops and bootcamps to help with the journey of developing a company; and specialized software,” said Jiménez about the program’s redesign.

“We worked on this multi-campus project for 3 years, and students can now create their own company from the moment they enter the program,” he added.

Rehák said that students begin to experience the essence of the degree from the moment they enter the program, by learning through challenges, from their mentors, from workshops and bootcamps, and from the actual industry with training partners.

“Students apply this knowledge to their own projects. They practically graduate with a portfolio that’s worth its weight in gold in the job market, as well as with their experience in executing startups,” Rehák said.

“We worked on this multi-campus project for 3 years, and students can now create their own company from the moment they enter the program.”

The project combined 5 main types of interventions:

• Industry leaders and graduates of the program as collaborators and training partners
• Personalized support for each student
• New challenge-based learning curriculum
• National Network and ecosystem of entrepreneurship
• Specialized EOS software to support entrepreneurship

The QS Reimagine Education Awards are organized by British ranking organization Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), which publishes the QS World University Rankings, one of the lists of the best universities in the world. 

Around 1,800 projects from over 70 countries participated in the 2022 QS Reimagine Education Awards.

The other winning projects from the Tec at the 2022 awards were “Education 4.0 Platform to Foster Innovation and Entrepreneurship for All,” by Arturo Molina and Jhonatthan Miranda, which won first place in the “Nurturing Employability” category.

The “Remote, Cyber-Physical and Virtual Platforms for Engineering Training” project, led by Manuel Macías García, won silver in the e-learning category.

READ MORE: