At the end of a live recording of the videocast Negócios com Impacto at Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics, someone asked the most uncomfortable question one can ask an entrepreneurship professor: whether entrepreneurship can truly be taught. The panel had discussed what Portugal lacks for entrepreneurship to grow sustainably, capital, incentives, mentorship. Legitimate issues. But this question touched on a dimension that had been left out: what happens before all that, in the classrooms where future entrepreneurs are formed.
There is an answer, but it requires reframing the question. The problem is not whether entrepreneurship can be taught. It is whether we are teaching what actually matters.
A generation well equipped for the wrong problems
Students arriving in our undergraduate programs today are more equipped than any previous generation. They use artificial intelligence to draft a pitch in twenty minutes, they are fluent in social media in ways established brands envy, and they manage side projects. Digital competence is not the issue.
The problem emerges when they are confronted with what tools cannot do: formulating a good question about a problem no one has yet named, speaking to ten real people before having a solution, reinterpreting negative feedback instead of ignoring it. They have learned to execute within defined systems but have rarely been invited to act without a map. By valuing the elegance of the model over the rigor of testing, education has prepared them to perform entrepreneurship rather than to practice it.
What the first wave built and its blind spots
Since the beginning of this century, Portuguese universities have normalized entrepreneurship as a legitimate path and created incubators, acceleration and mentorship programs that have produced spin offs. A real cultural shift. But it was built on assumptions that now deserve revision. The first is treating entrepreneurship as a destination rather than a transversal competence, as if the goal were always to create a startup, when what the Portuguese economy most needs are managers, private sector professionals and public servants who think entrepreneurially. The second blind spot is the uncritical adoption of imported models. The Business Model Canvas and Lean Startup principles are useful, but a healthcare startup cannot ignore the National Health Service or data protection laws, and a project in the interior of the country does not finance or scale like a SaaS company in Lisbon. The model is the same, the reality is not.
What education needs to develop
Researcher Saras Sarasvathy reached a counterintuitive conclusion when studying experienced entrepreneurs: the best do not start with a goal and build a plan to reach it. They start with what they have, the resources they control, the problems they observe, and co create opportunities from there. Instead of perfect business plans for ideas that no one has tested, teaching guided by this principle places students in contact with real problems in their own environment. The
process is less elegant and much closer to what entrepreneurs do. To this we must add systems thinking. Portugal has specific complexities that imported models do not capture, from asymmetries between coastal and inland regions to one of the fastest demographic transitions in Europe. Teaching entrepreneurship without mapping these systems is preparing students for a country that does not exist.
Purpose as strategy
Students in this generation have a genuine desire to build impactful projects. Education has an opportunity here that it often wastes, reducing purpose to strategic decoration, a slide about social impact followed by a return to the conventional business model.
An example: a team develops a fitness app with reasonable growth metrics and a clear monetization strategy. When asked whose life is changed by the product, they can describe a marketing persona, but not a real person. The suggestion to speak with users at a nearby senior center initially seems like a distraction. Three weeks later, the team returns with a discovery that market data had not revealed: loneliness is the most prevalent health issue among older adults in Portugal, linked to immobility and digital disconnection, and no existing solution addresses it. The project becomes a platform for active aging with an intergenerational connection component. The value proposition becomes richer, the strategy more coherent, and the team begins making decisions for reasons it can clearly explain.
Portugal is one of the fastest aging countries in Europe, with more than a quarter of its population over 65. Aging represents an opportunity for innovation in digital health, inclusive housing and proximity services. Teaching entrepreneurship as if the target market were always a 28-year-old urban consumer ignores one of the country’s most significant structural transformations.
Three practical changes
Teaching time should prioritize action over theory. Questions such as “what did you discover this week that contradicts your hypothesis?” teach more than any model. But this requires close and regular mentoring, which most institutions still do not recognize as legitimate teaching work.
Projects improve when they involve real partners. The fiction of the semester startup produces limited learning because it operates in an institutional vacuum. Projects developed with municipalities, hospitals or companies in transformation expose students to the constraints every entrepreneur faces: bureaucracy, long decision cycles, regulations not designed for new solutions. This friction is pedagogical and cannot be simulated.
Finally, pitch competitions have value, but when they become the central ritual of teaching, they send the wrong message. Entrepreneurship is not a race with a single winner. It is an iterative process that benefits from collaboration. Peer feedback and open sharing of results, including failures, better prepare students for this reality.
What the ecosystem can do
The Portuguese ecosystem has real gaps in early-stage venture capital and in regulation that keeps pace with innovation. But there is one variable that is rarely addressed from the outside: the quality of the training entrepreneurs bring with them when they enter the market. A program that funds incubators without investing in the pedagogy that feeds them is building infrastructure without content.
Portugal does not need more graduates capable of delivering a compelling presentation. It needs people who can identify real problems, work with uncertainty and build solutions suited
to the country that exists, not the one imagined in American textbooks. The generation in our classrooms has the tools for that. What education can and should provide is the ability to use them for the right problems.
Students are ready. The question is whether the rest of the ecosystem is too.
Sílvia Almeida, Professor at CATÓLICA-LISBON