Higher education for social entrepreneurship in the quadruple helix framework: co-construction in open innovation

The processes of innovation that organizations of the knowledge society need to implement are often oriented towards achieving higher levels of well-being, benefits for society, sustainable development, etc. Higher education institutions maintain a relevant role in this context because of the impact they can generate from establishing linkage projects; these can be established from paradigms such as open innovation and the quadruple helix model. Thus, the training models of higher education institutions must be aligned with the type of human capital that society requires, that is, people with innovation and entrepreneurial competencies that impact on social benefits for the community. The purpose of this document is to present the current status of a doctoral thesis research plan regarding the development of competencies for social entrepreneurship from the linkage in higher education institutions. To comprehensively understand the research problem, a literature review is presented, as well as a mixed-methods study with a sequential, concurrent design to collect qualitative and quantitative data. The results are expected to set guidelines to propose a training model for the development of social entrepreneurship competencies from linking projects. The progress of this research accounts for contributions of the theoretical framework and a first look at the method.