A primary goal of The Pennsylvania State University's new Engineering Entrepreneurship (E‐SHIP) Minor is to build students' life skills so they can succeed within innovative, product‐focused, cross‐disciplinary teams. The E‐SHIP Minor is designed for undergraduate students majoring in engineering, business, or IST (Information Sciences and Technology) who aspire to be innovation leaders for new technology‐based products and companies. This paper outlines five E‐SHIP program components to meet this mission: the core courses for the minor, E‐SHIP competitions in which students exhibit their products and ideas, the E‐SHIP Event Series, student organizations to support out‐of‐classroom entrepreneurial interest, and team projects for local industry and Penn State researchers. Penn State's engineering entrepreneurship program is reviewed, summarizing both quantitative and qualitative assessment data to date, previewing future assessment plans, and providing a summary of lessons learned during the development and implementation of this program.
Engineering capstone design and certain entrepreneurship courses have some similarities in terms of student outcomes, course structure, and instructional methods. Both types of courses have the tendency to be less structured than traditional courses and utilize teaching methods such as problem-based or project-based learning. The goals relating to the professional skill set are often similar and can include communication, writing, business, and team skills. Entrepreneurship instructors often focus on the development of the "entrepreneurial mindset" while design instructors focus on the development of "design thinking," characteristics that have some similarities. The role of the teacher in both areas is less likely to be a lecturer, but rather as a coach or a guide that assists students in completing a longer-term project. Many capstone courses have an industry component and can even have an entrepreneurial component. The purpose of this paper is to compare the teaching beliefs and practices of instructors of capstone design courses and entrepreneurship courses. The following research questions will be used to compare the beliefs of capstone versus entrepreneurship instructors:
EXECUTIVE SUMMARYEntrepreneurship skills are vital to the future of the US economy and its ability to support continual wealth creation. Traditional educational methods do not teach such skills; indeed they may hinder them. The initiative described creates a new way to provide a valuable entrepreneurial learning experience to a large number of students at all levels. This can only be achieved by developing a "scalable" model to reduce teacher load in course creation and management, and student interaction. This paper describes a pilot experiment at State University, the first of a four stage plan to make entrepreneurship education available to the majority of students in the US.To date 135 students developed entrepreneurial skills at State University using a unique problem based learning (PBL) approach with all course materials and grading managed on-line. The results of the pilot indicate that a problem based, on-line approach to learn entrepreneurship is viable with significant upside potential. Surprisingly, it was just as difficult for the faculty to get out of the traditional "teaching mode" as it was for the students to get out of the "passive learning" mode.Nevertheless, the students' final projects and presentations suggest that the learning experience succeeded and students developed a realistic understanding of what it takes to be an entrepreneur.Further, the experience resulted in a plan of improvements to the method, three of them key. First, given the natural ambiguity of PBL to develop entrepreneurial skills, it is imperative that structural aspects of the course are as unambiguous as possible. Second, the grading and support structure of the course need to reward student self-sufficiency. Third, in-class activities must be structured so that teams are forced to be fully prepared for each session so that facilitators are not tempted to regress to "chalk and talk" style. 1: INTRODUCTIONThis paper reports on a pilot, cross-college course that is the first step in a multi-year program designed to expand entrepreneurship learning for all interested students in the State University Page 11.115.2 2 system and then to educational units throughout the USA. (2003)(2004), the pilot BA/ENGR497G course was developed and delivered. The key learning objective of this course was to have students acquire entrepreneurial knowledge and skills. The learning process focused around problems that introduced key concepts of entrepreneurship using custom material with web-accessible and other rich media content. The students worked in diverse teams (no more than two members from one major) of three to six students using on-line course management software (ANGEL). The challenge to each team:develop a new venture concept that could grow to $50M in annual revenue by year 5. The course deliverables were an executable plan, an elevator pitch, and a formal investor presentation. The students learned about and then implemented solutions to entrepreneurial issues including bootstrapping, opportunity identification, intellectual ...
As a result of economic and workforce trends, there is a strong interest among policy makers and educational stakeholders in graduating more engineers with entrepreneurship skills and an entrepreneurial mindset. Given the role that ABET accreditation takes in shaping undergraduate engineering curriculum, wide adoption of entrepreneurship education could be driven by demonstrating the manner in which its outcomes align with accreditation mandates. This work in progress describes research taking place that is designed to develop a robust rationale for aligning entrepreneurship education with ABET Criterion 3 a-k, and to provide examples of the manner in which entrepreneurshiprelated outcomes can meet these criteria.
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