Developing Intercultural Competences For Entrepreneurship Among Students Through Virtual Exchange

Summary Finding an effective way to teach entrepreneurship in a classroom requires providing broader opportunities forexperiential learning (Kuratko, 2005). To do so, “professors must become more competent in the use of academic technology and ... include new and innovative approaches” (Solomon, Duffy, & Tarabishy, 2002). Furthermore, as the vast geographic distances between countries and cultures are diminishing (Crose, 2011), universities should prepare students to function in an interconnected world (Abrahamse et al., 2015; Fayolle & Klandt, 2006). International exchange presents a challenge to many students due to high cost, difficulty of transferring credits, and a reluctance to leave friends and families (Abrahamse et al., 2015). Thus, international virtual classrooms (IVC) are becoming an increasingly popular, accessible and cost- and time-effective alternative (Taras et al., 2013; Zwerg-Villegas & Martínez-Díaz, 2016). The IVC pedagogical and organizational approaches are, however, still in their development. In this PDW, we address such approaches for teaching entrepreneurship through an IVC, based on a project across ten universities located in six Latin American and European countries with more than thirty staff members and hundred students participating in three parallel IVCs leveraging different methodologies to teach entrepreneurship through design thinking, global opportunity recognition, innovation ecosystem and networks content. Style The PDW starts with a brief introduction based on our experience with the IVC. It continues with a group discussion, focusing on the issues to consider, tools to use and process of organizing and teaching an IVC on entrepreneurship. It concludes with the discussion of key outcomes and next steps. Outcomes This PDW brings three-fold benefits: 1) better understanding of tools and organization process; 2) reflection adaptation of the specific topics, such as design thinking, opportunity recognition and netwo