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Introducing Engineering and Science Students to Entrepreneurship: Models and Influential Factors at Six American Universities
Abstract
This paper reports on how traditional science and engineering students are being taught entrepreneurship at six American universities. Each participating institution follows one of three models, which differ with respect to location within the university, organizational structure and approach to attracting students. Teaching, new venture creation and, to a lesser degree, research are the most common goals driving the technological entrepreneurship initiatives at these universities. The most universal assets are internal champions and interest on the part of alumni and current students, while the lack of elective credits in the engineering curriculum is a common barrier.
... Limited research is available as to how academic institutions structure entrepreneurship initiatives for engineering students. The Standish- Kuon and Rice (2002) study was the only available research that showed the approaches taken by the first academic institutions in the United States to educate engineering undergraduates about entrepreneurship. The findings from this study also resulted in the emergence of a typology which presented the three models to which entrepreneurship initiatives could be categorized into, and ultimately the three models that institutions could follow to educate their engineering students about entrepreneurship. ...
... In the second phase, the data was collected from entrepreneurship initiative descriptions on the websites of institutions in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. A content analysis was conducted, and the distinguishing criteria identified in the Standish- Kuon and Rice (2002) typology were used to categorize the entrepreneurship initiatives reviewed. ...
... This demonstrates that academic institutions in the five countries use one (or in some cases more) of the five models to educate engineering undergraduates about entrepreneurship. The presence of the five models showed that the Standish- Kuon and Rice (2002) typology required updating to reflect present-day initiatives for engineering undergraduates. These findings, as a result, laid the foundation for the emergence of a new typology, which was subsequently entitled the Entrepreneurial Engineering Education, or EEE, typology. ...
Background-World economies are demanding a new type of engineer-an entrepreneurial engineer-who possesses a multidisciplinary set of technical and entrepreneurial competencies. These new engineers are essential to the fostering of entrepreneurship, innovation, and technological enhancement within an economy. Given the importance of having entrepreneurial engineers, it is necessary for tertiary-level academic institutions to prepare their engineering students to undertake these roles. This is being done by offering entrepreneurship education to engineering students. Limited research is available as to how academic institutions structure entrepreneurship initiatives for engineering students. The Standish-Kuon and Rice (2002) study was the only available research that showed the approaches taken by the first academic institutions in the United States to educate engineering undergraduates about entrepreneurship. The findings from this study also resulted in the emergence of a typology which presented the three models to which entrepreneurship initiatives could be categorized into, and ultimately the three models that institutions could follow to educate their engineering students about entrepreneurship. In recognition of the importance of entrepreneurial engineers coupled with the need for developing a greater understanding of entrepreneurship education for engineering students, it has become necessary to review the types of initiatives used to educate engineering students about entrepreneurship. Doing this will help to determine the relevance of the Standish-Kuon and Rice (2002) typology regarding present-day initiatives. It is important to know whether this typology still represents the initiatives offered at U.S. institutions and whether or not this typology can be applied in a non-U.S. context to show how engineering students in other countries are educated about entrepreneurship. Purpose-The purpose of this research was to acquire information about how tertiary-level academic institutions in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States are educating engineering undergraduates about entrepreneurship. The overall objective was to determine whether the Standish-Kuon and Rice (2002) typology was still representative of entrepreneurship initiatives for engineering undergraduates, or if the typology had to be updated. N. K.O. Fraser, M. P. Miles, M. Woods*, G. K. Lewis JEEN-The Journal of Engineering Entrepreneurship 86 Design/Method-This research used a desktop review approach conducted in two phases. In the first phase, the data was collected from entrepreneurship initiative descriptions on the websites of tertiary-level academic institutions in the United States. In the second phase, the data was collected from entrepreneurship initiative descriptions on the websites of institutions in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. A content analysis was conducted, and the distinguishing criteria identified in the Standish-Kuon and Rice (2002) typology were used to categorize the entrepreneurship initiatives reviewed. Findings-The findings showed that a total of five models were used to categorize entrepreneurship initiatives for engineering undergraduates. This demonstrates that academic institutions in the five countries use one (or in some cases more) of the five models to educate engineering undergraduates about entrepreneurship. The presence of the five models showed that the Standish-Kuon and Rice (2002) typology required updating to reflect present-day initiatives for engineering undergraduates. These findings, as a result, laid the foundation for the emergence of a new typology, which was subsequently entitled the Entrepreneurial Engineering Education, or EEE, typology. Conclusion-The Standish-Kuon and Rice (2002) typology, while still valuable, requires updates to represent the evolving educational needs of the engineering field and entrepreneurship education's place in engineering. The need for extension has resulted in a new typology, the EEE typology, which could ultimately be used to conduct future research that will enhance the field of entrepreneurial engineering and gain insight into entrepreneurial engineering education. Areas of interest for future research are also discussed.
... Next to the more traditional entrepreneurship education through business administration programs, this increasingly takes place also in faculties of science, engineering and technology. Yet, to date, research that discusses the content of, and effect of SBEE, on university-industry technology transfer is scarce (Maresch et al. 2016; Barr et al. 2009;Lackeus and Middleton 2015;Souitaris et al. 2007;Standish-Kuon and Rice 2002;Blake Hylton et al. 2019). Further insight in this would help to asses why and how SBEE can support university-industry technology transfer. ...
... The review shows that university-industry technology transfer via university-industry collaboration on the level of research is well-researched. However, the role of educationin particular SBEE, whereby a particular type of academic education is seen as a means for university-industry technology transfer, is a relatively under researched topic (see Barr et al. 2009;Lackeus and Middleton 2015;Maresch et al. 2016;Souitaris et al. 2007;Standish-Kuon and Rice 2002;Blake Hylton et al. 2019). ...
... They also found that inspiration is pivotal in creating entrepreneurial intents through education and recommend to focus on creating such inspirational effects in science and engineering curricula. Standish-Kuon and Rice (2002) found, based on six case studies at American universities, that promoting the work and practices of succesful entrepreneurial students, alumni, and other entrepreneurial champions in science and engineering programs, is highly stimulating for science and engineering students to become entrepreneurs themselves. ...
This paper explores the potential of university-industry technology transfer through science-based entrepreneurship education (SBEE). The scientific literature focuses mostly on enabling university-industry technology transfer via university-industry collaboration in research, and not so much in (science) education. The paper identifies four strands of relevant literature for further theorizing SBEE principles to research its contribution to industry-technology transfer: 1. Embedding entrepreneurship education in universities; 2. Balancing theory and practice of entrepreneurship education; 3. Cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset through entrepreneurship education; and 4. Creating spin-offs through entrepreneurship education. One of the main theoretical contributions of this paper is, that SBEE is different from regular entrepreneurship education in its need for being firmly embedded in a science, technology and R&D environment, both within and outside the university. This is important in order to give SBEE students the opportunity to gain experience with handling the hurdles for successful university-industry technology transfer. The main empirical finding is that elements in the program, related to for example the balance between teaching entrepreneurship through theory and experiential learning, are not systematically covered. It means that fundamental questions such as: Can entrepreneurship be indeed taught? Which elements of entrepreneurship can be taught through theory, and which ones must be experienced in practice? are currently left unanswered. Systematic coverage of these questions enables a better exploitation of the possibilities that SBEE offers for university-industry technology transfer.
... Limited research is available as to how academic institutions structure entrepreneurship initiatives for engineering students. The Standish- Kuon and Rice (2002) study was the only available research that showed the approaches taken by the first academic institutions in the United States to educate engineering undergraduates about entrepreneurship. The findings from this study also resulted in the emergence of a typology which presented the three models to which entrepreneurship initiatives could be categorized into, and ultimately the three models that institutions could follow to educate their engineering students about entrepreneurship. ...
... In the second phase, the data was collected from entrepreneurship initiative descriptions on the websites of institutions in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. A content analysis was conducted, and the distinguishing criteria identified in the Standish- Kuon and Rice (2002) typology were used to categorize the entrepreneurship initiatives reviewed. ...
... This demonstrates that academic institutions in the five countries use one (or in some cases more) of the five models to educate engineering undergraduates about entrepreneurship. The presence of the five models showed that the Standish- Kuon and Rice (2002) typology required updating to reflect present-day initiatives for engineering undergraduates. These findings, as a result, laid the foundation for the emergence of a new typology, which was subsequently entitled the Entrepreneurial Engineering Education, or EEE, typology. ...
The purpose of this research was to acquire information about how tertiary-level academic institutions in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States are educating engineering undergraduates about entrepreneurship. The overall objective was to determine whether the Standish-Kuon and Rice (2002) typology was still representative of entrepreneurship initiatives for engineering undergraduates, or if the typology had to be updated. This research used a desktop review approach conducted in two phases. In the first phase, the data was collected from entrepreneurship initiative descriptions on the websites of tertiary-level academic institutions in the United States. In the second phase, the data was collected from entrepreneurship initiative descriptions on the websites of institutions in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. A content analysis was conducted, and the distinguishing criteria identified in the Standish-Kuon and Rice (2002) typology were used to categorize the entrepreneurship initiatives reviewed. This research used a desktop review approach conducted in two phases. In the first phase, the data was collected from entrepreneurship initiative descriptions on the websites of tertiary-level academic institutions in the United States. In the second phase, the data was collected from entrepreneurship initiative descriptions on the websites of institutions in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. A content analysis was conducted, and the distinguishing criteria identified in the Standish-Kuon and Rice (2002) typology were used to categorize the entrepreneurship initiatives reviewed. The findings showed that a total of five models were used to categorize entrepreneurship initiatives for engineering undergraduates. This demonstrates that academic institutions in the five countries use one (or in some cases more) of the five models to educate engineering undergraduates about entrepreneurship. The presence of the five models showed that the Standish-Kuon and Rice (2002) typology required updating to reflect present-day initiatives for engineering undergraduates. These findings, as a result, laid the foundation for the emergence of a new typology, which was subsequently entitled the Entrepreneurial Engineering Education, or EEE, typology.
... Entrepreneurship education has developed very fast across the world since the 1990s until now [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. Although entrepreneurship education growing fast, technology-based entrepreneurship education for engineering students was rather later and fewer [8,9]. In a survey of 160 academic institutions, Streeter et al. [10] found that entrepreneurship-related courses have been offered in nearly 90% of the bachelor programs in business schools while less than 40% engineering bachelor programs contain entrepreneurship courses. ...
... For those undergraduate entrepreneurship programs in engineering schools, a concern is how the credits from those entrepreneurship courses can be recognized in an engineering field. Lacking space and time for elective credits in engineering degree programs is a major and common barrier to entrepreneurship courses for engineering students Standish-Kuon, [8]. This is not a big problem in the business school since entrepreneurship courses are accepted as management or management related courses. ...
It is widely believed that the technology-based entrepreneurship has great potential to increase wealth and competitiveness. Researchers believe that Technology-based Entrepreneurship Education (TEE) may raise students’ awareness about the technology entrepreneurship and the opportunities for technology commercialization. However, TEE has a relatively shorter history than conventional entrepreneurship education in business schools and there are fewer cases. This paper will use a revised 4W1H framework to review existing models of TEE and then present the TIPE model that has been implemented at a university in Hong Kong since 2001 for master students. Educational and policy implications are explored finally.
... In preparation for the course we start looking for entrepreneurship programs in other Engineering school and we realized that in order for our program to be successful we need to consider and follow the model from Standish et al. 3 highlighted five elements that will define entrepreneurship in education they are "developing intellectual content, gaining institutional acceptance, engaging students and alumni, building relationships with the business community and lastly showcasing success" 3 . We used this model as the starting point for our plan of implementation to build our course; therefore the faculty generated and funded from this grant a senior design project starting in the fall of 2012. ...
... In preparation for the course we start looking for entrepreneurship programs in other Engineering school and we realized that in order for our program to be successful we need to consider and follow the model from Standish et al. 3 highlighted five elements that will define entrepreneurship in education they are "developing intellectual content, gaining institutional acceptance, engaging students and alumni, building relationships with the business community and lastly showcasing success" 3 . We used this model as the starting point for our plan of implementation to build our course; therefore the faculty generated and funded from this grant a senior design project starting in the fall of 2012. ...
... They can also be taught by engineering faculty, business faculty, practicing engineers, or a mix of different members. 3 These program differences lead to variations in assessment methods and instruments. Most importantly, there is also a lack of a clear, consistent and comprehensive definition of engineering entrepreneurial characteristics in the community. ...
... During the competition, the students may also be asked to present a one-page essay describing their future entrepreneurship plans. This approach was utilized at Stanford University by establishing the MIT Entrepreneurial center in 1996, called Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) (Standish-Kuon and Rice, 2002). Government should also intensity their effort in ensuring that engineering graduate must be posted to companies/factories where they can acquire some entrepreneurial skills. ...
There has been growing concern of high rate of unemployment among engineering graduates, roaming the nation's streets in search for white collar jobs, despite the fact that entrepreneurial courses have been introduced to the engineering curriculum, as a distinct set of commercial skills and techniques to improve the employability of these graduates. This paper, which draws strength from detailed review of literature, presents views on how the academic institutions, industries and the government can help to reinforce, sustain and consolidate the engineering entrepreneurship programme, with the hope to produce well rounded, morally and intellectually capable engineering graduates with entrepreneurial skills, who could create jobs rather than look for jobs. This will go a long way to reduce the unemployment rate and enhance positive impact on national economic development. Some suggested roles which the academic institutions, industries and government can play in building the skills and competences of the engineering students include: frequent organization of seminars and practical classes or hands-on business activities based on innovative engineering projects, new business development, preparation of business plan, formation of strategic alliances or strong ties outside the university setting to include alumni and local businesses communities that can interface with the entrepreneurial program, mixing students from several engineering departments, and ensuring entrepreneurial courses which relate market needs to the research activities offered by academic institution. Similarly, more funds should be provided by the government for entrepreneurship programs and creation of adequate well equipped entrepreneurship centers across the nation.
... As the National Academy of Engineering [1] states, "innovative thinking should be an expectation of the university community and all students should be exposed to it early" (p. 6). Accordingly, multiple strategies have been enacted to attempt to engage students in innovation-focused learning, including engaging with design-based coursework in engineering settings [2] - [4] and providing learning experiences that emphasize entrepreneurial thinking [5] - [8]. While such initiatives strongly influence students, undergraduate learning continues to remain separated into individual silos, leaving students without access to authentic, transdisciplinary environments [9]. ...
Universities have long played a crucial role in shaping society’s responses to changing technologies, economies, and living environments. However, to continue to harness the nation's great technological potential, universities must seek to better prepare undergraduates for addressing complex, contemporary challenges in both innovative and transdisciplinary ways. To best meet society’s needs, undergraduates should embrace the ability to build upon new ideas, processes, and ways of seeing things that add value to the world in a manner that emphasizes social and personal responsibility across fields of study. As the National Academy of Engineering [1] states, “innovative thinking should be an expectation of the university community and all students should be exposed to it early” (p. 6). Accordingly, multiple strategies have been enacted to attempt to engage students in innovation-focused learning, including engaging with design-based coursework in engineering settings [2] - [4] and providing learning experiences that emphasize entrepreneurial thinking [5] - [8]. While such initiatives strongly influence students, undergraduate learning continues to remain separated into individual silos, leaving students without access to authentic, transdisciplinary environments [9]. However, this paper highlights a recently developed transdisciplinary undergraduate education program focused on democratizing the practices of innovation across the broader college campus. Through this program students, regardless of their background or major, participate in co-teaching and co-learning from faculty and students in different academic units as they design, test, and optimize solutions to modern problems over multiple semesters. An examination of how the integration of these elements throughout multiple iterations of one component of the program will be presented along with its influence on students entrepreneurial thinking in regard to problem framing. These results will be positioned to better inform the development of similar educational programs as colleges and universities now have the responsibility to build a better future through the pandemic in novel and positive ways.
... These initiatives have resulted in the growth of a new subfield of engineering education, engineering entrepreneurship. Initially focused on program descriptions (Creed et al., 2002;Standish-Kuon & Rice, 2002) and conceptual papers calling for transforming engineering education with the introduction of entrepreneurship (Byers et al., 2013), engineering education has met these needs with rapid program development (Gilmartin et al., 2014;Gilmartin et al., 2016;Shartrand et al., 2010), exploration of an engineering entrepreneurial mindset (Bilen et al., 2005;Kriewall & Mekemson, 2010;Rae & Melton, 2016;, review of program models (Duval-Couetil et al., 2016), research in assessment (Purzer et al., 2016;Shekhar et al., 2017;Shekhar & Bodnar, 2020;Woodcock et al., 2019), research on faculty beliefs (Zappe et al., 2013), research on engineering student career choices and intentions (Jin et al., 2016), and development of numerous classroom interventions (Boulanger & Tranquillo, 2015;Gerhart & Melton, 2016). Results from these scholarly works and others have contributed to the growth in engineering entrepreneurship programming, both curricular and cocurricular. ...
Background
Recent research has demonstrated the importance of entrepreneurship education programs (EEPs) in the professional development of engineering students. Numerous universities have adopted various forms of EEPs which are typically offered as elective programs. To create suitable programs that will encourage students to seek out EEPs, it is critical to understand the factors that influence student participation in EEPs. Using qualitative research methods, we examined the question “What influences engineering students’ participation in entrepreneurship education programs?” The purpose of our work is to identify and understand the factors impacting engineering student participation in EEPs.
Results
Analysis of 20 semi-structured interviews of undergraduate engineering students was conducted using the first and second cycle coding methods to determine key factors that inform students’ participation in EEPs. We found that student decisions to participate in EEPs are influenced by several factors: entrepreneurial self-efficacy, entrepreneurial intent, attitude, subjective norm, goals, academic transitions, information and resources, social capital, opportunities and challenges, and past participation in EEPs.
Conclusions
Findings demonstrate that students’ non-compulsory participation is not a result of a single act, but is regulated by multiple factors. Explication of these factors using our qualitative results provides actionable guidance for EEPs to encourage engineering students’ participation and offers directions for future research.
... Lean Collaboration on Campus? A Social Network and Bricolage Approach highly structured course sequences aimed at accreditation bodies, and limited evidence of immediate benefits all may reduce STEM student participation in I&E activities (Standish-Kuon and Rice, 2002;Duval-Couetil, Shartrand, and Reed, 2016;Duval-Couetil, Reed-Rhodes, and Haghighi, 2012). ...
... Multiple barriers exist in the educational curriculum that limit the students' participation in entrepreneurship courses. Standish-Kuon and Rice illustrated that many engineering students face the dilemma of the limited availability of approved electives that specifically teach entrepreneurship (Standish-Kuon & Rice, 2002). Acquiring the accreditation of ABET forces many institutions to design their academic programs in a very structured and sequenced manner which bounds the students' ability to enroll in elective courses outside the immediate scope of the engineering discipline. ...
Mechanical engineering department at the United Arab Emirates University has added to the ABET student outcomes an additional outcome - “l: a recognition of the need for and an ability to engage in entrepreneurial activities”. This paper details the assessment tools employed in measuring the level of attainment of this student outcome as well as implementation approach. Several direct and indirect assessment tools are developed for measuring the level of attainment of this additional outcome. Direct assessment is carried out through courses, graduation project, and industrial training while indirect assessment is executed through student exit survey, employer survey, alumni survey, and faculty opinion. The average achievement level of this additional outcome, between 2011 to 2014, among graduates is 3.8/5.
... 14 The need for a "new" engineer is gaining widespread acceptance [15][16][17] and details of innovative experiments in engineering entrepreneurship education have been published. [18][19][20][21][22] Organizations such as the entrepreneurship division of ASEE, NCIIA, and Stanford's REE program are developing a critical mass of resources supporting engineering entrepreneurship. ...
... The careers of engineers often grow to incorporate managerial and strategic responsibilities which are almost impossible without an ability to consider business and legal issues and to communicate effectively to many different audiences. 1,2,3,4 And, as Meier et al., suggest even those who remain squarely within a technical arena, "are being asked to take responsibility for the overall system." 5 One subject that neatly encompasses the concepts of innovation (implying new markets and new products), opportunities, creating networks, management, risk, ownership and the pursuit of value creation is entrepreneurship, despite the absence of a cohesive theory (or unified definition) in the literature. 6 There will continue to be challenges related to the creation of entrepreneurship theory and entrepreneurship education. ...
... Several in-depth descriptions of specific programs and courses in technology-focused entrepreneurship have been written [6,7,8,9,10,11]. However, to date there has been no comprehensive or systematic effort to identify, document, and characterize these initiatives broadly or in a way that allows comparison of the multiplicity of programs. ...
... Another main focus is to treat all projects the same and have consistent requirements across all class sections; no project is exempt from the entrepreneurial thinking course, nor the pitch competition, and all projects need to define their value and impact. Many studies say this is the most important component of an entrepreneurship education [15], [16], [17], [18]. Students often struggle with understanding and communicating value and can be particularly difficult for nonproduct senior design projects that are unable to use a return on investment model. ...
... As a result, entrepreneurship education has spread laterally to non-business disciplines such as engineering, technology, science, and arts [10]. This expansion has led to an evolution of entrepreneurship education from the business school model of venture creation to focus on developing skills in graduates that foster innovation in their career pursuits which may or may not involve self-employment [11]. Particularly in engineering, several curricular and co-curricular entrepreneurship programs have been initiated which typically use student-centered, experiential learning approaches to impart content knowledge and more importantly develop entrepreneurship-related skills in engineering graduates [12]. ...
... Expanding from a business school focus of venture creation [4], EEPs in engineering also place emphasis on the development of entrepreneurial mindsets and behaviors in graduates. Many EEPs seek to promote innovation and creativity in students pursuing both entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial career paths [5]. To develop entrepreneurially-minded engineers, EEPs often leverage student-centered teaching practices (e.g., project-based learning, group discussion, pitch competitions, mentorship, and experiential learning) to instill entrepreneurship practices such as opportunity identification, customer discovery, validation and pivoting [6], [7]. ...
... Entrepreneurial-minded learning (EML), which can be thought of as extension of active and collaborating learning, has shown to improve learning by further emphasizing discovery, opportunity identification, and value creation [11]. EML has been embedded within engineering curricula, with the goal of helping students learn and practice entrepreneurial skills and mindsets within an engineering context [12,13]. EML literature suggests three broad learning domainsaffective (i.e., self-efficacy), thinking patterns (i.e., developing connections in the pursuit of value creation), and content knowledge/skills [14]. ...
... In addition, teachers should be encouraged to integrate these activities into their subjects (e.g. mentoring their projects and activities; including their main challenges as case studies and using their activities to evaluate students in particular tasks), avoiding the main barrier to the participation in extracurricular activities, which are students' time constraints (Standish-Kuon and Rice, 2002). Finally, participation in extracurricular activities can be promoted by institutions in many ways, for example, by allowing students to obtain academic credits through their participation or by supporting financially or logistically the organisations which promote these activities. ...
Purpose:
This study assesses the effects of junior enterprises (JEs) on the entrepreneurial attitudes and intentions of engineering higher education students, compared to a group of social sciences students.
Design/methodology/approach:
This research analyses a sample of 132 students enrolled in engineering higher education courses in Portugal and Brazil, while 83 of the respondents being involved in a JE and 49 not. The authors compare this group to another group of 176 social sciences students from several higher education courses, while 93 being enrolled in JE and 83 not.
Findings:
The results show that students enrolled in JEs show higher levels of entrepreneurial intention (EI), as well as their antecedents such as attitude towards the behaviour (ATB), perceived behavioural control (PBC) and social norms (SN) , and the impact of this extracurricular activity is higher on engineering students than on social sciences students. Also, country and gender differences were found in some variables.
Research limitations/implications:
Further studies are needed to confirm the results in a broader population and in other countries. Also, the study addressed attitudes and intentions but not actual behaviour due to the time lag problem. There is also the risk of self-reported bias on the answers due to social desirability bias, for example. Finally, because JEs have their own recruitment process, there is a possible “self-selection problem” of students who might have previously developed some of entrepreneurial attitudes and skills assessed by the questionnaire.
Practical implications:
The results have important implications for engineering higher education institutions. Despite many of them provide entrepreneurship training courses, they should also encourage students to join extracurricular activities or even create their own at their institution to complement their skills' development. Also, teachers should be encouraged to integrate these activities into their subjects, avoiding a major barrier to the participation in extracurricular activities which is the students' time constraints. Finally, participation in extracurricular activities can be promoted by institutions in many ways, such as allowing students to obtain academic credits or through supporting financially or logistically the organisations that promote these activities.
Social implications:
This study contributes to the discussion on how to promote the development of entrepreneurial competences in young people that soon will enter the labour market.
Originality/value:
This study contributes to the discussions on the value of extracurricular activities, such as the enrolment in JEs, to the development of entrepreneurial attitudes and intention on the training of the next generation of engineers capable of facing future worlds' challenges.
... Studying entrepreneurship is increasingly viewed as a way to prepare students for the realities of the working world where they must contribute to the commercial success of any enterprise they join or create. Some of the most prominent U.S. universities including Stanford and MIT have well-established technology entrepreneurship initiatives that have successfully prepared students to not only invent new technologies, but to innovate and disseminate these technologies through successful commercialization, thus maximizing positive economic and social impact 8 . ...
... They apply this attitude to themselves, their team and the world around them. The value creator is critical of the outcomes of their work, but paradoxically can remain positive about the progress made 45,8 . ...
... Soon, however, we recognized that a single joint weekly meeting students at all levels was very helpful because it helped junior students learn from senior students' knowledge and experiences on the one hand; and, on the other, it allowed senior students, as they interacted with their junior counterparts, to reflect on their own growth and the evolution in their thinking about various aspects of entrepreneurship. 9 Page 23.71.10 ...
... It is also notably different in some important aspects. Like the example courses 8,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31 , the Technology Entrepreneurship course sought to infuse innovative intelligence and an entrepreneurial attitude in technical education as well as provide students with the proper tools needed to identify and pursue real and potentially marketable business opportunities supported by effective business plans inclusive of business and technical details. It also included student teams for project assignments to help team members develop teamwork and flexible communication skills. ...
... When developing entrepreneurship programs, many authors consider it highly important to understand the factors that influence the intentions of entrepreneurs [16][17][18][19][20]. This is because the success in creating a new company depends fundamentally on the entrepreneur who uses his/her resources to work on his/her own. ...
This paper presents the results of three academic courses in which Entrepreneurship Promotion Programs (EPP) have been developed for engineering students at the University of Jaén. This study describes the activities and how they have been promoted using the social networks Facebook and Twitter. Grytics for Analytics software was used for monitoring Facebook activity. The use of these tools has also allowed the collaborative development of the Engineering degree competencies related to sustainability and entrepreneurship through the Materials Science disciplines. The study is based on questionnaires before and after the EPP which involved a sample of 459 engineering students. The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin test, Kolmogorov–Smirnov test and Pearson’s correlation were used. The questionnaires show which factors have the strongest influence on the intention to undertake entrepreneurial activity. Motivation (MO), personal requirements (PR), perception of the environment (PE) and the background requirements (BR) were the factors considered. The statistical study shows that PE and PR have a strong influence on MO. Finally, through the study before and after the EPP, the success of the activities and the use of social networks have been demonstrated. The results indicate that the activities of the EPP influence the perception of the environment and the motivation of the engineering students. However, the personal requirements are not affected by the activities.
... In addition to the practitioner sphere, innovation has attracted increased attention in the scholarly literature (Atwood et al. 2016;Taks, Tynjala, Toding, Kukemelk, & Venesaar, 2014). Studies have begun to characterize systematic approaches that develop creativity in students (Brent & Felder, 2014;Daly, Mosyjowski, & Seifert, 2014); promote makerspaces to foster new ideas (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014); incorporate technology innovation teaching and new venture creation (Jackson, Gordon, & Christholm, 1996;Standish-Koun & Rice, 2002;Taks et al., 2014); and focus on innovative design (Daly, Yilmaz, Christian, Seifert, & Gonzalez, 2012). The teaching of entrepreneurship should not only be geared towards generating entrepreneurs who start their own businesses but also intrapreneurs, that is, those who have an entrepreneurial mindset and can contribute to innovation within firms (Taks et al., 2014). ...
Fear is growing that robots and artificial intelligence will replace many occupations. To remain relevant in this changing career landscape, the worker of the future is expected to be innovative, able to spot opportunities transform industries and provide creative solutions to meet global challenges. To develop such capabilities, work integrated learning (WIL) has emerged as an important approach. The purpose of this study is to investigate the key factors driving innovation among WIL students. Unlike prior studies that have been predominantly qualitative or based on one single snapshot, this quantitative, longitudinal study measures student capabilities before and after participation in a WIL placement at a business. It then undertakes confirmatory factor analysis to compare pre- and post-placement capabilities. The study found that critical thinking, problem solving, communication and teamwork have significant impacts on the development of innovation: vital in the era of artificial intelligence.
... This paper provides insight into the many challenges of Technological Entrepreneurship Education to assist researchers and educators in moving forward with this area of knowledge and education in all its different forms. While pioneering work has been conducted in the United States (Creed et al. 2002;Ramachandran et al. 2002;Standish-Kuon and Rice 2002;Nichols and Armstrong 2003;Weilerstein et al. 2003 Stone et al. 2005;Thursby 2005;Evans et al. 2007) and this has greatly expanded the concept of technological entrepreneurship education (Thursby et al. 2009;Garcia et al. 2010;Herz et al. 2010;Waters 2010;Yock et al. 2011;Bradley et al. 2013;Schillebeeckx et al. 2013;Phan 2014;Addae et al. 2015;Oswald Beiler 2015;Bosman and Fernhaber 2017;Hayter et al. 2017;Huang-Saad et al. 2017), different forms of these activities are now seen as important by a wide range of stakeholder in many jurisdictions around the world (Wang and Wong 2004;Papayannakis et al. 2008;Alshumaimri et al. 2010;Wang and Verzat 2011;Solesvik 2013;Oehler et al. 2015). These challenges can be summarized as: philosophical, structural, and pedagogical. ...
This paper discusses the challenges of technological entrepreneurship education in the current education system and the questions that need to be answered to improve the efficacy and efficiency of technological entrepreneurship education. The nature of technological entrepreneurship requires a diversified set of skills for success; however, the traditional education system focuses on single discipline. Consequently, it is difficult for either engineers and scientists who are lacking managerial skills or management students who are lacking of engineer or science oriented knowledge to be successful. A further concern is that different communities have entirely different perceptions of how entrepreneurship is defined often causing both confusion and disagreement in communications between researchers and educators with each other. The paper considers the existing literature and develops a series of comprehensive questions that still need to be addressed. By answering these questions, the traditional education methods can be transformed to be more appropriate and useful for technological entrepreneurship education.
... Entrepreneurship education is considered one of the most important routes for honing innovative individuals in engineering departments (Huang-Saad and Celis 2017; Ling and Venesaar 2015). In line with this concept, Creed, Suuberg, and Crawford (2002) introduced the term entrepreneurial engineer to denote the future engineer, and entrepreneurship education has become increasingly present and important in engineering faculties (Da Silva, Costa, and de Barros 2015;Nichols and Armstrong 2003;Oswald Beiler 2015;Souitaris, Zerbinati, and Al-Laham 2007;Standish-Kuon and Rice 2002;Täks, Tynjälä, and Kukemelk 2016;Yemini and Haddad 2010;Zappe et al. 2013). ...
The future engineer is labelled an entrepreneurial engineer, having networking, teamwork, opportunity recognition, creativity, risk management, and discipline-specific skills. Therefore, entrepreneurship education is being increasingly introduced in engineering education. The various educational designs used to introduce entrepreneurship education have been discussed extensively, but a clear scheme for the classification of such methods is not available. In this study, a classification scheme for entrepreneurship education is introduced by building on prior frameworks and authentic learning situations to differentiate educational approaches and learning contexts. We explore and combine different models of entrepreneurship education offered at 10 technical universities in the Nordic countries. Through this exploration, we identify three categories of learning contexts, which we label ‘imitation’, ‘pretence’, and ‘real,’ adding to the three classes of educational conceptions identified in the literature and verified through empirical data: ‘teacher-directed’, ‘participatory’, and ‘self-directed’. This leads to a six-class taxonomy for entrepreneurship education approaches.
... The number of engineering and business participants varied from school to school; the largest number was 100 (10% of all participants) and among the smallest was 15 (2% of all participants). Our selection of engineering and business majors builds on histories of developing entrepreneurship learning environments in each field Standish-Kuon & Rice, 2002); this said, the specific programmatic features of entrepreneurship education at each of the 51 institutions were not collected as part of YES. ...
Background
In recent years, technological innovation and entrepreneurship have been emphasized in engineering education. There is a need to better understand which individual‐ and contextual‐level factors are related to engineering students' entrepreneurial intentions.
Purpose/Hypothesis
This study explores individual and contextual predictors of entrepreneurial intent among undergraduate women and men in engineering and business majors. Entrepreneurial intent is defined as the personal importance that students ascribe to starting a new business or organization.
Design/Method
The participants included 518 engineering and 471 business undergraduates from 51 U.S. colleges and universities. We examined relationships first by discipline and then by gender in each discipline using regression models with interaction terms.
Results
Innovation orientation and participation in entrepreneurship activities tied to intent more strongly for engineering students than for business students; in contrast, being at a research institution and selection of novel goals tied to intent more strongly for business students than for their engineering peers. Among engineering students only, being able to switch gears and apply alternative means for reaching one's goal in the face of setbacks was positively related with women's entrepreneurial intent but not with men's.
Conclusions
Entrepreneurial intent is a function of individual‐level characteristics and academic and social contexts, with some degree of discipline‐specific effects. Diversifying the community of aspiring engineering entrepreneurs is a critical issue that merits attention by the engineering education community.
... The most common way is to provide students, regardless of their majors, with university-wide minors, certificates, and courses [5]; typically delivered through business schools or colleges, these can be also designed and administered by multiple schools or colleges, tailoring the content of the coursework to non-business oriented students' needs [6]. Also, targeting more engineering students, entrepreneurship education has been embedded within engineering curricula, focusing more on technological innovation and commercialization [7]. These engineering programs and courses can help students learn and practice entrepreneurial skills and mindsets within engineering or technology-oriented contexts [5]. ...
Abstract—Contribution: Increased understanding of the influence of a project-based multidisciplinary design and innovation course on students’ engineering design thinking, specifically regarding problem framing.
Background: Entrepreneurship-related education has been offered to engineering and technology students, but its influence has been discussed mainly in terms of students’ self-efficacy or awareness of entrepreneurship or technological innovation, relying mostly on their self-reported data. Research Questions: 1) How do undergraduate students perceive the relationship between entrepreneurial mindsets and engineering design thinking after a project-based design course that integrates entrepreneurial activities and 2) How differently do they frame a design situation after this course?
Methodology: This qualitative case study involved 14 undergraduate students pursuing minor in design and innovation at a polytechnic institute. For more systematic data collection and analysis, a conceptual framework was developed based on literature about cognitive operations for problem framing and entrepreneurial engineering mindsets. Primary data were collected through semi-structured interviews and pre- and postactivities focused on problem framing. The interview and activity data were analyzed through multiple qualitative analysis approaches based on the conceptual framework.
Findings: The analysis of the interview responses reveals the participants’ thoughts on the role of an entrepreneurial mindset in engineering design practice, and the comparison between their pre- and post-problem framing activities shows that they tended to focus more on Customer and Social problem elements and less on Technical and Business problem elements after the course. However, important questions remain to better understand the impact of this change on their design abilities.
... Students have been offered opportunities to participate in business school-based programs, enroll in courses for a minor or certificate in entrepreneurship, or to take stand-alone courses targeting only engineering majors (Duval-Couetil et al., 2015). However, there have been concerns about engineering students' limited space in their academic programs to take more elective courses for an entrepreneurial mindset (Standish-Kuon & Rice, 2002). For these reasons, there have been discussions about how to best integrate an entrepreneurial mindset within engineering design courses (Davis & Rose, 2007;Hazelwood, Valdevit, & Ritter, 2010;Ochs et al., 2006;Sullivan, Carlson & Carlson, 2001). ...
Competitive growth in today's economy requires engineers to possess innovation skills to create novel designs. An entrepreneurial mindset enables people to think and then act in a certain way to discover, evaluate, and exploit opportunities by understanding the value proposition of a new idea, identifying the potential market, and adapting ideas to meet the needs and desires of various customer segments. However, secondary students often lack formalized opportunities to look for new opportunities for innovative design, act upon their design ideas, and transform those ideas into reliable investments of time and resources during their school experiences. Therefore, we propose that secondary engineering teachers can employ established entrepreneurial pedagogical interventions as a means to promote more authentic engineering design activities in STEM learning environments. The interventions can aid students in making more informed design decisions, engage them in developing viable solutions to authentic problems while investigating opportunities for exploiting their ideas, and thus, support the innovation capabilities of our future. Consequently, this article highlights methods in which to integrate an entrepreneurial mindset within high school STEM classrooms, specifically those focused on engineering.
... In addition to imparting business knowledge, these entrepreneurship programs place emphasis on fostering innovation among engineering undergraduates [8], [11], [12] to develop a diverse, innovative workforce [3]. As a result, these programs have emerged as a platform to teach innovation to engineering students from various sub-disciplines including but not limited to electrical engineering, computer science, and computer engineering. ...
Engineering entrepreneurship education programs are increasingly exposing students to entrepreneurship and innovation. Little is known about student learning gains in these programs, particularly from a gender perspective. This study examines gender differences in students’ Entrepreneurial Self-efficacy (ESE) among students enrolled in a senior-level College of Engineering’s entrepreneurship practicum course. The ESE Scale was administered at the beginning and end of the semester to measure students’ self-efficacy for five ESE constructs – searching, planning, marshalling, implementing-people and implementing-finance. The findings reveal improvement in students searching, planning, marshalling, and implementing-finance constructs after the course. Significant gender differences were found for planning, marshalling, and implementing-finance constructs in students’ pre survey responses with female students reporting lower ESE. However, no significant gender differences were noted in students’ post survey responses. This indicates that female students were able to reach similar levels of ESE as male students as an outcome of instruction. These results demonstrate the positive impact of an entrepreneurship course on female students’ ESE and the importance of entrepreneurship programs for promoting innovation regardless of gender.
... Teaching, creation of new ventures, and research are the focus of EN initiatives in universities. However, educational and pedagogical issues remain unchanged (Standish-Kuon and Rice, 2002;Fayolle, 2013). Such paradigm must be broken in order to offer an entrepreneurial mindset. ...
To the extent that innovation, entrepreneurship and environmental sustainability have been configured as good opportunities for organisations and society, innovation teaching and environmental sustainability teaching have gained importance for the development of an entrepreneurial mindset that can contribute to openness and management of organisations and for the preservation of the environment. Thus, this study aims to analyse the relationship between the constructs innovation teaching, environmental sustainability teaching and entrepreneurship, in the perception of students of higher education institutions (HEIs) in Southern Brazil. The methodology used was a quantitative research, applied to 502 students of higher education, analysed through the modelling of structural equations. The results highlight that encouraging entrepreneurship has become a high-priority topic in teaching-learning practices, as entrepreneurial activities are being considered as a driving force for innovation. In addition, it is important to highlight that innovation teaching is an important way to enhance the entrepreneurial mindset of college students, which may contribute to the local economy, to the opening of new businesses, and to the income generation without environmental damage.
Despite many initiatives from the government, the education programs in entrepreneurship did not make an impact in the society. This is due to the lack of throughout and thorough vision of the leadership especially in the education of workforce that masters engineering, legal and business aspects. Consequently, the medical device industry in Viet Nam has suffered from underdevelopment and always felt behind the government's expectations. It is clearly that an educational program focusing on the production of commercially viable products and education of a workforce in entrepreneurship are long overdue. In the framework of the Biomedical Engineering (BME) program at International University of Viet Nam National Universities in HCM City we propose an educational entrepreneurship in BME orientation to address these issues. Our efforts are threefold. First, we established an entrepreneurship undergraduate educational curriculum in BME to address real-world issues encountered in this field. Second, we initiated a student start-up company as a sandbox to test innovative ideas in the research and development, mass production, logistics and commercialization of medical devices developed by students. Third, we coordinated three groups of engineering, legal and business to optimize the production outputs. Past experiences allow us to drive interests from BME students for entrepreneurship orientation, design appropriate curriculum and select instructors with genuine practice. A careful SWOT analysis of our curriculum showed that it suits the ecosystem in Viet Nam and the “for” or “through” entrepreneurship model. The key performance indicators (KPI) were also established. The components of this model have been tested. The model will be tuned according to the obtained results.
Converting technical students into entrepreneurs is not a new concept, but now it is a necessary one to effectively address the unemployment issue. The present study explores the moderation effect of entrepreneurial attitude dimensions (i.e., achievement, innovation, personal control, and self-esteem) in the link between entrepreneurial characteristics and self-employment intention among technical undergraduates studying in different government and private technical institutions of Chhattisgarh state. Authors incorporated stratified random sampling method for collecting primary data. About 1245 questionnaires were sent to the technical students in which 1000 questionnaires were returned usable for analysis. Analysis revealed that the entrepreneurial attitude dimensions (i.e., achievement, innovation, personal control, and self-esteem) were found statistically significant moderator in the link between entrepreneurial characteristics and self-employment intention among technical undergraduates of Chhattisgarh state. However, the interaction effect was found to be negative.
Entrepreneurial ventures are the only way through which unemployment can be handled effectively. Emerging economies such as India knows their strength, but its searching ways to effectively cash it out. The present helps in finding the mediating effect of entrepreneurial attitude (i.e., achievement, innovation, personal control, and self-esteem) in the link between entrepreneurial characteristics and self-employment intention among technical undergraduates of different government and private technical institutions of Chhattisgarh. Stratified random sampling was used to collect 1000 responses from technical undergraduates. Regression and confirmatory factor analysis were applied to analyse the data. The findings explained that entrepreneurial attitude dimensions were found partially mediated between entrepreneurial characteristics and self-employment intention among engineering undergraduates.
p style="text-align: justify;">La selección de las mejores ideas de nuevos emprendimientos constituye un elemento importante para la toma de decisiones relacionada con la creación de una nueva empresa. Por esta razón se desarrolló un procedimiento teórico basado en el análisis multicriterio a partir de una matriz de decisión. Se analiza entre otros criterios la logística inversa a través de un índice de comportamiento medioambiental. La aplicación del procedimiento en el Centro de Desarrollo Empresarial de la Universidad Luis Vargas Torres de la provincia de Esmeraldas, Ecuador; permitió seleccionar la mejor idea de negocio asociada a un proyecto relacionado con la creación de una granja avícola que contribuye a la estrategia de desarrollo local y seguridad alimentaria.</p
As more entrepreneurial experiences are integrated into engineering programs, students are faced with new challenges they need help in managing. While previous research has identified entrepreneurial activities that engineering students struggle with, the antecedents of these difficulties have not been directly investigated. Drawing on an ethnographic study in a project-based entrepreneurship course, this paper investigates difficulties as caused by both cognitive conflicts and cultural clashes. The findings suggest that difficulties with entrepreneurial activities do not necessarily stem from lack of entrepreneurial capabilities on behalf of students, they can just as well stem from legitimate conflicts of interest that students and teachers need to navigate. As such, difficulties cannot always be solved by students learning more about entrepreneurship. As shown in the study, collaborative and externally oriented learning activities – mainstays of project-based entrepreneurship courses – particularly contribute to putting competing social demands on students.
While STEAM disciplines like engineering and the arts have made great strides in exploring pedagogical strategies for teaching entrepreneurship education, media entrepreneurship is much more in its infancy, having emerged in journalism and communication curricula in the early 2000s. These media-focused programs may teach career competencies such as digital communication, interpersonal and team skills and innovation strategies to a broad swath of interdisciplinary students, including those from engineering, arts and other STEAM disciplines. It has been a decade since Neck and Greene highlighted three “known worlds” of teaching entrepreneurship and proposed a new “method” world. Using recent syllabi solicited from media entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial journalism and journalism innovation courses, this study evaluates which of the “worlds” – entrepreneur, process, cognition, or method – is being utilized to teach entrepreneurship in the media and technology fields.
This study aims to determine the effect of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention through planned behavioural control, subjective norm, and entrepreneurial attitude. The previous studies related to applying the theory of planned behaviour focused on identifying the factors that determine entrepreneurship behaviour. This study is more concerned with identifying factors affecting entrepreneurial intention, attitude, and behaviour of university students majoring in business and non-business enrolled entrepreneurship courses. The research methodology uses quantitative research with a purposive sampling method that selects 450 samples based on specific criteria. The data analysis uses the SmartPLS for analysing discriminant validity and AMOS for testing the conceptual model. Entrepreneurship education in business students and non-business (education) students influences student’s entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviour. The entrepreneurial intention, perceived behaviour, and entrepreneurship attitude in business students are higher than those of non-business students.
Purpose
Entrepreneurship education at universities aims to create entrepreneurial thinking and spread the culture of entrepreneurial awareness, skills and attitudes to students to stimulate their entrepreneurship intentions as graduates. This study investigates the impact of entrepreneurship education on innovative start-up intention as well as the mediating role of entrepreneurial mind-sets of university students.
Design/methodology/approach
Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used for analysis with ( n = 204) valid questionnaires collected from university students.
Findings
The main findings show that entrepreneurial mind-sets mediate the relationship between entrepreneurship education and innovative start-up intention.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the body of knowledge by its application in a higher educational institution and enriches the literature with new evidence that entrepreneurship education could enhance innovative start-up intention.
This paper describes a pedagogical framework and a set of team-based learning (TBL) activities which can be applied to an interdisciplinary course comprised of a mix of engineering, design, and business students. The goal of the team-based learning (TBL) activities is to help students to appreciate both the benefits and the challenges of working in interdisciplinary teams. To enhance their interdisciplinary collaboration skills, students engage in a series of knowledge sharing and knowledge integration activities, based on the Jigsaw technique, a team-based learning methodology. These activities enable the students to recognize and reconcile their disciplinary differences and biases, which arise because of the cognitive diversity of the team. Students are assigned to interdisciplinary teams to identify and prototype an entrepreneurial opportunity. By the end of these activities, students are able to incorporate the perspectives of all three disciplines to develop an integrated team mental model (TMM) of the opportunity recognition and opportunity evaluation process.
This literature review aims to identify articles which are related to the topic of this entrepreneurship training class to find out the results of theoretical studies and empirical research on the objectives, benefits of the appropriate entrepreneurship training model for students. Meanwhile, the benefits of searching articles and compiling this literature study are to get an idea of the extent to which the development and benefits of the entrepreneurship training model have been carried out by educational institutions and other organizations. The method of preparing this literature review through several things. Firstly, finding articles by visiting several databases. Secondly, selecting several articles by considering several criteria, including: peer-reviewed full paper published in international journals; empirical study; research methods explained; research related to supply chain management studies. Thirdly, articles obtained at the search stage in both databases will be checked in bibliography and type of research. The categories of articles obtained are divided into two, namely conceptual and empirical research results. Fourthly, articles will be analysed and divided into several categories, namely: year of publication, method, results, bibliography and number of citations in each article analysed. Finally, articles related to entrepreneurship training class are identified through aims, benefits, models and factors. The results of this literature review show that there are similarities and differentiation among the outcome of scholars associated to the aims, benefits, models and factors of entrepreneurship training.
Como parte del proceso transformador que tiene lugar en la universidad ecuatoriana se
desarrolló esta investigación que tiene como objetivo elaborar un modelo para la gestión
del vínculo Universidad-Empresa-Gobierno en la Universidad Técnica Luis Vargas
Torres. La necesidad de fuentes de empleo obliga a las personas a incursionar en
pequeños negocios; sin embargo, este proceso se realiza de una forma empírica, sin
tener el conocimiento técnico-administrativo suficiente que permita administrar la
empresa eficientemente, obtener fuentes de financiamiento y contribuir a la
transformación de la matriz productiva. De ahí la pertinencia del estudio que muestra
como principales resultados la estructura y funcionamiento de un modelo de
vinculación, los principales elementos que apoyan la creación del Centro de Desarrollo
Empresarial y Apoyo al Emprendimiento y los impactos socioeconómicos logrados a
partir del perfeccionamiento de los vínculos entre Universidad-Empresa y Gobierno.
Over the past two decades, significant work has been done to increase the opportunities for engineering students to develop an entrepreneurial mind-set (EM). These have included curricular, cocurricular, and extracurricular activities on many campuses. This article describes efforts to build the EM comprehensively into the mechanical engineering curriculum at Ohio Northern University. While several frameworks have been proposed related to the EM, the work here is motivated by the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network framework (KEEN). A core group of college faculty identified the institutional definitions of the KEEN student outcomes and identified courses for deployment of these outcomes to provide comprehensive, curriculum-wide exposure to the EM. This article discusses how the work was completed, incentive and reporting structures for onboarding faculty, the adopted strategies for program assessment of the EM outcomes, and efforts to ensure long-term sustainability of the curricular modifications. Observations, challenges, and unexpected benefits are discussed, as well as anticipated next steps for college-wide implementation.
This learning innovation article’s purpose is to provide educators with a course assessment tool that can be used to improve student outcomes in an undergraduate, production innovation, and development course, comprised of cross-functional teams (business and engineering students). We demonstrate, in our article, how over a period of 3 years, we used the assessment tool to help make course changes that would influence student learning outcomes. We demonstrate how we used the tool to focus on particular student skills, made specific changes targeted at selected skills, and measured if these course changes were effective with engineering student outcomes.
Although important to business and economic development, entrepreneurship education has offered its customers (i.e., students) mixed experiences. While some prior studies find entrepreneurship education to have a positive effect on entrepreneurial attitude or activities, others report the opposite, suggesting the need to consider environmental factors. Drawing on the nascent research on customer experience management, this study treats entrepreneurship education as a service product and advocates that service providers take a “touchpoint journey view” in that the providers should manage or influence all touchpoints in the environment—some touchpoints are internal to the providers, while others may be external. This perspective leads to a comprehensive conceptual model that identifies ten student-resource touchpoints across three areas: a) curricular b) regulatory environment, and c) social environment resources. With a unique sample of students who are systematically exposed to all three types of resources through a pilot entrepreneurship program, this study finds empirical evidence to support the proposed model. These findings offer pertinent implications to entrepreneurship education design (e.g., totality of various touchpoints). In addition, with the rising influence of the Chinese economy, this study also represents a meaningful step toward a better understanding of consumers’ service goods experience in this strategically important market.
A survey in 1991 of 750 business schools and 226 engineering schools identified 370 universities with entrepreneurship courses. Entrepreneurship courses were taken to mean courses on business entry, whether by start-up or acquisition and whether independently or within an established organization. Descriptions of 445 courses at 177 four year colleges and universities both inside and outside the United States were generated. Of the 177 schools describing their courses, 102 (58%) gave brief accounts of pedagogical experimentation: 60 (59%) described successful experiments, 42 (41%) described new things tried that had not worked out. A summary of some of these experiments is provided and discussed
This article presents the results of a survey that ranked university entrepreneurship programs. The survey also explored how universities determined what courses constituted a program in entrepreneurship and how they determined the criteria that impact an entrepreneurship program's quality. We conclude the article with a discussion of the education pilot criteria for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award that may be useful for measuring progress in entrepreneurship education.A mail survey was undertaken in late 1994. This survey was sent to deans at 941 business schools in the United States, 42 in Canada, and 270 overseas. Of the 311 replies, 233 came from U.S. business schools, 16 from Canadian schools, and 62 from schools in other countries.The top seven criteria suggested for ranking entrepreneurship programs were courses offered, faculty publications, impact on community, alumni exploits, innovations, alumni start-ups, and outreach to scholars. The most frequently offered entrepreneurship courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in the entrepreneurship programs surveyed were entrepreneurship or starting new firms, small business management, field projects/venture consulting, starting and running a firm, venture plan writing, and venture finance.The survey uncovered a number of problems with how academics ranked other entrepreneurship programs. Evaluators did not specify the criteria they used to rank entrepreneurship programs. Evaluators did not offer their specific weights for each criterion used to judge a program. Finally, evaluators were not asked to provide a judgment of their depth of knowledge of other programs.Since the criteria for determining what constitutes a high-quality entrepreneurship program is, at present, rather fluid and indeterminate, we thought it appropriate to borrow insights from a highly successful and visible evaluation effort in higher education, the education pilot criteria for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA). For an MBNQA evaluation, organizations are assessed across 28 requirements that are embodied in seven categories. •Leadership. This category examines senior administrators' commitment and involvement in creating and sustaining performance excellence that has a student focus, clear goals, and high expectations. In the context of entrepreneurship education, the leadership category entails describing the involvement and commitment of entrepreneurship program directors, business school deans, university administrators, advisory board members, and student representatives.•Information and Analysis. This category examines how data and information are used to support the overall mission of the program. The focus of this category is towards identifying and specifying information and data that would be appropriate for evaluating the quality of an entrepreneurship program, as well as for making comparisons with other programs. We suggest that entrepreneurship programs begin to systematically collect information about issues such as demographic and performance measures of incoming students enrolling in entrepreneurship courses; comparative information on entrepreneurship, business school and university students; descriptions of the outcomes that specific entrepreneurship courses intend to generate and the measures of the efficacy of each course; and measures of the intended outcomes of the entrepreneurship program in terms of student performance, student satisfaction, and impact on the community (i.e., number of start-ups, students employed in new firms, students working in positions assisting new firms).•Strategic and Operational Planning. This category focuses on how a program sets strategic directions and key planning requirements. For an entrepreneurship program, such a requirement would entail generating a strategic plan that specifies the purpose and mission of the program, key student and overall program performance requirements, external factors impacting the implementation of the plan, internal resources and university barriers to change, and key critical success factors.•Human Resource Development and Management. This category examines how faculty and staff are supported and developed so as to satisfy the strategic goals of the program. While an entrepreneurship program might typically measure “faculty productivity” as an indicator of this category, the intention is actually towards specifying the resources and systems that impact the ability of staff and faculty to be productive.•Educational and Business Process Management. This category specifies key aspects of the design and delivery of the educational research and service components of a program, as well as an examination of the processes involved in improving these components. Rather than programs being compared to each other by the quantity of courses offered, this category requires that programs be measured on the logic, coherency, and efficacy of the educational experience that entrepreneurship students undertake.•School Performance Results. This category examines the outcomes of a program, such as student performance and improvement, improvement in services provided by the program, and faculty productivity. This category accounts for 23% of the total evaluation score. The primary focus of this category is determining the improvements in student performance. Such key measures might include student performance in specific courses, student demonstrations of key skills and knowledge through portfolios of original work that they create, measures of student satisfaction, and impact on the community (i.e., number of start-ups, students employed in new firms, students working in positions assisting new firms).•Student Focus, and Student and Stakeholder Satisfaction. This category describes the process for determining student and stakeholder needs and expectations, as well as making comparisons of student and stakeholder satisfaction among other programs. This category accounts for 23% of the total evaluation score.The MBNQA evaluation scheme forces us to become aware of the implicit goals, objectives, and pedagogical perspectives of our programs. We must not lose sight of the fact that entrepreneurship programs are and will be evaluated, and that we must, therefore, be ready to offer criteria that we want our programs to be evaluated on. If university entrepreneurship educators do not step forward to assume leadership of our own field, others will surely come to the forefront to determine the rules of the game.
- This paper describes the process of inducting theory using case studies from specifying the research questions to reaching closure. Some features of the process, such as problem definition and construct validation, are similar to hypothesis-testing research. Others, such as within-case analysis and replication logic, are unique to the inductive, case-oriented process. Overall, the process described here is highly iterative and tightly linked to data. This research approach is especially appropriate in new topic areas. The resultant theory is often novel, testable, and empirically valid. Finally, framebreaking insights, the tests of good theory (e.g., parsimony, logical coherence), and convincing grounding in the evidence are the key criteria for evaluating this type of research.
The field of entrepreneurship has grown at an incredible rate over the past 20 years as evidenced by the increased number of endowed positions, academic organizations, journals, and other publications. A telephone survey of all (232) U.S. universities with at least 10,000 students was conducted to determine the extent of the growth of educational programs focusing on entrepreneurship. The results indicate that educational programs are widely spread throughout this segment of the educational infrastructure but that most remain relatively underdeveloped.
The field of entrepreneurship has grown at an incredible rate over the past 20 years as evidenced by the increased number of endowed positions, academic organizations, journals and publications. A telephone survey of all (91) Canadian universities that are members of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada was conducted to determine the extent of entrepreneurship programs and their development in terms of size and resources. The results indicate that entrepreneurship education in Canada is in need of development in terms of both the number of small schools (student population under 8000) offering programs and the general quality of those programs.
This paper describes the process of inducting theory using case studies-from specifying the research questions to reaching closure. Some features of the process, such as problem definition and construct validation, are similar to hypothesis-testing research. Others, such as within-case analysis and replication logic, are unique to the inductive, case-oriented process. Overall, the process described here is highly iterative and tightly linked to data. This research approach is especially appropriate in new topic areas. The resultant theory is often novel, testable, and empirically valid. Finally, framebreaking insights, the tests of good theory (e.g., parsimony, logical coherence), and convincing grounding in the evidence are the key criteria for evaluating this type of research.
Infusing Entrepreneurship into the Core Curriculum: A Project of the National Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers
- M P Rice
Rice, M.P., Infusing Entrepreneurship into the Core Curriculum: A Project of the National Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers, Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Kansas City, MO, 1996.