Entrepreneurship and innovation. A perspective of economic, social and sustainable development in Zone 6

Abstract

This article is aimed at building a theoretical-academic management model for the development of innovative entrepreneurship policies and programs at the Catholic University of Cuenca, which contributes to the professional profile in the different careers, leading to offering a methodological proposal for its components. integrators, with political feasibility for its implementation at UCACUE. For this, it was necessary to apply information collection instruments to students of the eighth and ninth cycles of sixteen careers at the Catholic University of Cuenca from the period March-August 2019, which served to prepare the researcher's Doctoral Thesis called "Theoretical-academic management model for the development of innovative entrepreneurship policies and programs at the catholic university of Cuenca", aims to enhance the capabilities of the student population and expand their opportunities in terms of job and income generation, in a way collective and sustained, based on the development and productive vocation of the enterprises in zone 6 and their economic potential, so that they can autonomously exercise their rights as citizens and improve their quality of life in a sustainable way. In order to fulfill this purpose, it was necessary to have the political commitment of institutional actors, and strategic guidelines to foster and promote an entrepreneurial culture and productive links, innovation and research. The study is located in the positivistic, empirical-analytical quantitative epistemic paradigm, corresponds to the field design, not experimental and transectional, and is located at a descriptive level. Key informants were selected through sampling. The techniques of the survey and the interview were applied, and as instruments of data collection; the questionnaire and the script of questions to the different social actors, in order to take into account, the observations and theoretical, methodological contributions of the productive, business and government sectors. The instruments were validated through expert judgment. The study is oriented in the description of the administrative and academic processes regarding the ideas, purposes and problematizations that revolve around entrepreneurship, for which it was necessary to develop the projects, programs and an integrated plan for UCACUE, which allows contributing to the development of the entrepreneurial culture in the training of leading professionals and entrepreneurs as one of the transversal axes of the University's processes, through the design of the institutional strategy for research, development, innovation and incubation, and contributing to the construction of learning processes, based on the creation of added value in curricular and extracurricular academic processes, considering University policies linked to the sustainable development of the territory. Among the conclusions presented in this first article, the majority of students consider that the important projects in their training are research, because they build knowledge from intellectual and practical links, it is appreciated that entrepreneurship projects are needed to strengthen the entrepreneurial spirit, which requires training students with responsibility, commitment, effort, dedication, perseverance and a spirit of work.