The main objective of the prodPhD project is to implement innovative social network-based methodologies for teaching and learning entrepreneurship in PhD programmes. The multidisciplinary teaching and learning methodologies to be developed will allow introducing entrepreneurship education in any PhD programme of a higher education institution, providing students with the knowledge, skills and motivation to engage in entrepreneurial activities. The methodology will be conceived to develop experiential knowledge, involving academics, entrepreneurship experts and mentors in its development and implementation. Besides, the exchange of experience, competences and approaches facilitated by social networking will allow crowdsourcing new ideas, improving training methodologies and stimulating entrepreneurial skills of academics. In particular, prodPhD will deliver and demonstrate, through different pilot actions, a social network-based training methodology, which will include the necessary teaching guidelines and specific “learning by doing” materials for entrepreneurship training, as well as the required prodPhD Online Training Environment, integrating customized collaborative work and social network solutions. The outcome of the prodPhD project will be openly offered to the higher education community. The project is built on the collaboration with four running ERASMUS+ and MSCA-ITN projects, involving 20 higher education institutions from nine different EU countries, and more than twenty-five companies and research centres. Besides, four running H2020 running projects and sixteen other European associations and organizations will also collaborate with the project by becoming members of the Expert Advisory Board of prodPhD. This collaboration will be fundamental for the specific requirements analysis and for the development and assessment of the demonstration actions to which all the collaborating institutions will be invited to participate.

The concept of this project is to organise two competitions for transport research awards to be announced at the TRA conference in 2016 - A student competition with the goal of stimulating the interest among young researchers/students in the field of sustainable surface transport. - A competition for senior researchers in the field of innovative surface transport concepts based on results only from EU-funded projects.