Entrepreneurship Education, Business Plan, and the Pyramid Principle

Abstract

This article focuses on the teaching of a business plan as a tool for entrepreneurship education through the structure of the pyramid principle, seeking to find out how this framework was used to teach the preparation and communication of the business plan. The case study involved 332 students grouped into 104 projects, developed as a part of the degree in management at the Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra for ten years. The study is qualitative and quantitative and shows that 97.1% of the projects were based on customer needs. The method of teaching students was to guide them to effectuation, implying the application of the contingency model to teach the business plan. However, only 28.4% of the students in the sample indicated an increase in awareness for entrepreneurship and 20.9% stated that learning how to prepare the plan would be useful in the future.