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Chilean doctoral programs in science and technology generally do not consider entrepreneurial training within their curricula. Taking an entrepreneurial competency approach, we explore the potential impact of introducing an entrepreneurship education course to doctoral students based within a non-commercial research environment. We identified two main areas of possible impact: the potential effects upon doctoral research projects and upon the doctoral students themselves. We followed the learning experiences of science and technology PhD students before, during, and a year after an entrepreneurial course through a multiple case study research design. Our results suggest that entrepreneurship education has a positive impact upon the development of student's creative problem-solving and communication skills. This was reported to have a generally positive effect upon the students' doctoral projects and on the student's self-efficacy and entrepreneurial intentions. We conclude that entrepreneurship education complements traditional doctoral training for students within a non-commercial academic setting.

Although evidence shows that it is challenging to implement, many authors state that participatory management is a distinctive attribute of social enterprises. This paper presents case study research exploring how participatory management is manifest in Chile, a country where a paternalistic and autocratic management style prevails thereby constraining the adoption of more collaborative approaches. We found that a majority of the twenty social enterprises considered, despite having very different sizes, governance structure and activity sectors, involved employees and stakeholders in shared decision-making processes. Participatory management was exhibited in distinctive and diverse ways ranging from common agreement on strategic decisions through to the presentation of new proposals by members. We conclude that social enterprises in Chile differ from conventional enterprises not only in their focus on trying to solve social problems, but also in the fact that they may provide a vehicle to promote more innovative and participatory approaches to decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]