Teaching Innovation: Designing, Structuring, and Learning Through UNITEC’s Pre-Incubation Programs
📌 Quick Overview – UNITEC Pre-Incubation
| Aspect | What We Did |
| Approach | Combined proactive planning with user-friendly, rigorous tools grounded in systems thinking |
| Key Tools | Standardized rubrics, feedback templates, entrepreneur surveys, dashboards, indicator matrix, Theory of Change |
| Innovation | Introduced the Pasaporte Emprendedor to track participation, competencies, and progress across events |
| Benchmarking | Comparative study of national and international incubators to identify best practices and guide improvements |
| Focus Dimensions | Evaluation & selection, monitoring & follow-up, integration of innovation & impact, communication strategies, evidence-based learning |
| My Role | Acted as architect and innovator: designed frameworks, introduced new schemes, ensured coherence and usability |
| Impact | Transformed pre-incubation from isolated events into a structured journey that builds entrepreneurial capacity and tells a coherent story |
Introduction
Entrepreneurship education is often mistaken for a series of isolated workshops or events. In reality, supporting early-stage entrepreneurs requires a coherent journey, where every activity builds deliberately toward specific outcomes. At UNITEC, I had the opportunity to help strengthen the pre-incubation process by creating tools and frameworks that turned scattered activities into a structured, measurable, and purposeful experience.
For me, design was about finding the balance: the system had to be simple enough for operators to use, rigorous enough to satisfy academic standards, and user-friendly enough to encourage adoption. Guided by systems thinking, I worked to align practice with theory, so that every interaction with entrepreneurs could generate knowledge, build capacity, and tell a larger story.
From Planning to Experimentation
When I joined the UNITEC incubator network, practices varied across campuses. My role was to understand how operations worked on the ground and translate that into structures that could be used consistently.
Some of the first steps included:
- Designing standardized rubrics to evaluate business plans fairly across campuses.
- Creating feedback session templates, so that committees could capture structured observations and agreements for each entrepreneur.
- Developing entrepreneur surveys (profile, event feedback, pre-incubation reflections) to systematically gather input from participants.
- Introducing the concept of the Pasaporte Emprendedor, a database that recorded every event in which an entrepreneur participated, using a simple form to track both quantity (events, hours, satisfaction) and quality (competencies built over time).
This was more than record-keeping. By articulating experiences in one place, the Pasaporte allowed incubators to plan programs more deliberately—ensuring that events were not just familiar topics, but stepping stones toward specific competencies.
Building the Technical Backbone
The system relied on connected tools that supported both monitoring and learning:
- Dashboards to visualize business plan evaluations in real time.
- A matrix of indicators to track outcomes at each stage—pre-incubation, incubation, and post-incubation.
- A Theory of Change that defined how UNITEC’s programs were expected to generate impact, aligning activities with outcomes and evidence.
Together, these instruments turned the entrepreneurial route into a structured journey rather than a set of disconnected activities.
Anchoring in Key Dimensions
A benchmarking study of national and international incubators helped identify best practices and inspired the work at UNITEC. From that analysis, we anchored our improvements in five key dimensions:
- Standardized evaluation and selection.
- Stronger follow-up and monitoring mechanisms.
- Integration of innovation and impact into program design.
- Clearer communication and outreach strategies.
- Evidence-based learning and decision-making.
These dimensions made it possible to move the pre-incubation process closer to international standards while keeping it practical and tailored to UNITEC’s context.
Organizational Realities
Each campus had its own way of doing things, and resources varied. My challenge was to create systems that were light enough to be adopted but solid enough to provide reliable information. That balance—between simplicity, rigor, and usability—was critical.
This is where systems thinking proved essential. Instead of building heavy processes that would burden coordinators, we introduced tools like the Pasaporte Emprendedor, which made follow-up intuitive while still producing valuable data. By embedding these mechanisms, campuses could adapt their practices while staying aligned to a common framework.
My Role: The Architect
In three months, my role was to act as an architect and innovator. I introduced new schemes like the Pasaporte Emprendedor, co-designed processes with the special projects coordinator, and ensured that each tool was not an isolated deliverable but part of an articulated system.
I approached pre-incubation as a narrative: every form, rubric, and dashboard was a chapter in the larger story of how UNITEC builds entrepreneurial capacity. My systems engineering background shaped this view—connecting operations, theory, and user experience into a coherent architecture.
Reflexions
What I learned at UNITEC is that entrepreneurship education is most powerful when it tells a story from beginning to end. By planning proactively, introducing new schemes, and capturing learning, we transformed pre-incubation from a collection of events into a deliberate journey.
The Pasaporte Emprendedor embodied this vision: a simple tool that helped structure experiences, measure competencies, and connect every hour of participation to long-term growth. In the end, my role was not only to design tools, but to articulate a system of continuity and coherence—a system that could evolve with the institution and empower entrepreneurs to see their path more clearly.
