Entrepreneurial Thinking in a First-Year Engineering Design Studio

Abstract

Anneliese Watt is a professor of English at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. She teaches and researches technical and professional communication, rhetoric and composition, medicine in literature, presidential election rhetoric and other humanistic studies for engineering and science students. Her current work focuses on engineering design. Entrepreneurial Thinking in a First-Year Engineering Design StudioIn summer 2016, the authors and several other collaborators developed and taught a course aiming to advance the pedagogy informing a proposed new degree program in Engineering Design, in which design, writing, and engineering topics are integrated into a multidisciplinary design studio setting. Most closely associated with the disciplines of industrial design and architecture, design studios immerse students in an authentic problem-solving environment:"In studio, designers express and explore ideas, generate and evaluate alternatives, and ultimately make decisions and take action. They make external representations (drawings and three-dimensional models) and reason with these representations to inquire, analyze, and test hypotheses about the designs they represent. Through the linked acts of drawing, looking, and inferring, designers propose alternatives, and interpret and explore their consequences. ... They use the representations to test their designs against a priori performance criteria. And in the highly social environment of the design studio students learn to communicate, to critique, and to respond to criticism, and to collaborate."

A Systematic Review of Student Entrepreneurial Failure in Engineering Education

“…One of the likely reasons for the commonality of the KEEN framework is the number of universities and instructors who have partnered with the organization to develop instructional changes based on the entrepreneurial mindset. For example , Bernal, et al (2017) explicitly mentions that the course was developed with funding from the foundation.…”

Fostering Curiosity, Creating Value, and Making Connections in First-Year Students Through Product Archaeology

“…As entrepreneurial mindset is identified to consist of both inherent and learned traits [15], it is important that we start exposing engineering students to the concepts associated with this framework as soon as they start their engineering degree. Several programs have worked on the integration of entrepreneurial mindset into their first-year engineering design programs [16][17][18][19][20][21].…”

“…Throughout the discussion of the design process students were introduced to elements of entrepreneurial mindset to encourage student exploration of the problem space and their work towards creating a product that would provide value [18]. Most of these implementations have also scaffolded the process for students by providing them with either mini projects [18] or a series of smaller activities prior to the completion of an open-ended design project [16,17].…”

Building Toys for Children by Applying Entrepreneurial-minded Learning and Universal Design Principles

“…One of the primary catalysts for this growth has been the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), which consists of 47 institutions that share the goal of developing undergraduate engineers so that they can "create personal, economic, and societal value through the entrepreneurial mindset" [3]. Many of these efforts have focused on the first-year by leveraging the design process as a touch point for discussing EM-related outcomes [4][5][6][7][8][9]. In "The Engineering of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century", the National Academy of Engineering put forth a call to prepare students with new knowledge that advances society and creatively applies technology with broad consideration [10].…”