A Snapshot of Entrepreneurship Education at Canadian Engineering Schools – A Representative Overview from EETI SIG Members

Abstract

With the rise of an innovation-based, technology-centric economy over the past two decades, there has been a shift in the market, enabling technological entrepreneurs to build business ventures that have realized accelerated growth and reached considerable scale. This “new economy” has created a need for individuals with a balanced skill set accompanying both business acumen, and technological innovation of complex systems. In esponse to this need, post-secondary engineering education institutions are teaching more business and entrepreneurship content. In Canada, most of the major post-secondary engineering education institutions offer some form of entrepreneurial education. However, approaches and programs offered by respective institutions vary in their approach to teaching engineering entrepreneurship, yielding a variety of different program implementations. There is, thus, a strong need to develop a Community of Practice focusing on engineering entrepreneurship education in Canada to foster a more rigorous and collaborative effort to evolve entrepreneurial teaching and learning. This paper is a first attempt to document and interpret the current state of a select number of Canadian Engineering Entrepreneurship Education programs. The founding members of the Canadian Engineering Education Association’s (CEEA) Engineering Entrepreneurship and technology innovation (EETI) Special Interest Group (SIG) have collaboratively collected information regarding the current practice of Engineering Entrepreneurship education within their affiliated institutions. This paper examines the Institutional Context, Strategy, Business Infrastructure, as well as the programs employed for Teaching and Learning at both the Undergraduate and Graduate levels. Our goal is to present a snapshot of the current practice for which entrepreneurship education is delivered at the institutions for which the founding members of the EETI SIG reside, as well as, discuss how entrepreneurship intersects with the other areas of engineering education, for example, design, the maker space movement, and professionalism, as well as, many of the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board’s twelve graduate attributes.

Engaging Engineering Students with Engineering Entrepreneurship and the Start-Up Working Environment through Supervised Entrepreneurial Work-Integrated Learning

“…Teaching entrepreneurship within engineering programs is particularly useful for engineering students for two main reasons. First, as was previously recognized, entrepreneurship education offers "an experiential learning opportunity for students and graduates to practice and demonstrate their twelve (12) attributes defined by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB)" [3]. Second, while most entrepreneurship programs in Canadian universities are offered by business faculties, engineering is the most common educational undergraduate background of Canadian tech start-up founders across all industries, except for the healthcare sector, where a science degree dominates [4].…”

“…Although the practice of teaching engineering entrepreneurship can be considered to be established in higher education, entrepreneurship education research is still only emerging, in particular within engineering education [3]. More generally, entrepreneurship education research has identified the need to distinguish entrepreneurship education activities based on their purposed goals, commonly labelled as teaching about, for, and through entrepreneurship [5].…”

Promoting Entrepreneurial Mindset and Practice Through Online Bootcamp in COVID-19

“…The rise of technological innovation-based companies greatly changed the economic developments over the past few decades by commercialization of scientific and technology-driven innovations. As a result, employers and policymakers alike demand more graduates with the mindset and skills to recognize and create innovative entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship opportunities in order to remain competitive [1]. Furthermore, Engineers Canada has identified "entrepreneurship, innovation, and creativity" as one of the five core values for the engineering profession in Canada [2].…”