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

Abstract

The rise of technology-based companies greatly changed the economic developments over the past few decades by commercialization of innovation. As a result, employers need more graduates with the mindset and skills to recognize and create innovative entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship opportunities. To meet this increasing demand, many engineering schoolsattempted to generate the talent and skills of future engineers, the methodology for commercializing new technological innovation started to form. However, there are gaps in terms of the practice of delivering entrepreneurship education to engineeringstudents in an effective manner. This is due to three major challenges in this COVID-19 pandemic era. First, the traditional engineering education program was developedduring the post-war era, it focuses on contents and designs. While these address certain skills for entrepreneurship, the program design does not provide opportunities to develop important skills such as cross-disciplinary collaboration, tolerance to risk and failure. Second, the traditional program also creates another challenge due to its heavy math and science-focused content, as a result, most of the engineering programs are packed in terms of student schedule, leaving very little room for students to different or enhance their education by taking additionaleducational opportunities in entrepreneurship. And lastly, the adoption of online education for engineering entrepreneurship remains low. Thus, the literature provides little insights on how to effectively deliver, practice and evaluate the learnings of engineering entrepreneurship education remotely for degree-granting institutions. The following article proposed a weeklong Bootcamp to introduce students to a robust process to instill an entrepreneurial mindset and practice. The structure and delivery of the Bootcamp through an online platform are discussed in detail along with student feedback.