Seven Challenges in Conceptualizing and Assessing Entrepreneurial Skills or Mindsets in Engineering Entrepreneurship Education

Abstract

The growth of undergraduate entrepreneurship education programs and research, both within and outside of business programs, has led to a diverse array of academic literature on this topic. The diversity of perspectives has led to many conceptual and educational challenges that remain unresolved within the literature. The following conceptual paper offers a critical perspective on challenges that have been identified. A narrative-style literature review was conducted to explore challenges emerging from both (a) the practice of teaching entrepreneurship and (b) the definitions and assessment of entrepreneurial mindsets and skills that result from those education processes in entrepreneurship education, particularly within an undergraduate engineering education context. We achieve this objective by discussing previously dispersed sources of literature from disciplines that have critically discussed and explored entrepreneurial themes, such as business education, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. Contemporary debates within multiple disciplines are integrated and organized as challenges to inspire new theoretical discussions among scholars, educators, and other practitioners that can inform a more comprehensive way to conceive and assess entrepreneurship in engineering education. Seven challenges were identified ranging from the definition of entrepreneurship in education to the role of ethics in the teaching and assessment of entrepreneurship. We use these seven challenges and research questions as a starting point for the disambiguation of the working definition of entrepreneurship in the context of engineering education.

Sustainable entrepreneurship education for circular economy: emerging perspectives in Europe

“…In confirming EE's relevance at European level (Ndou et al, 2018;Miranda et al, 2020;Secundo et al, 2020), findings provide elements for proposing innovative way to create competence in the CE field from an entrepreneurship perspective as well as for derive a major understanding of the way through which Universities structure their entrepreneurial education programs for CE. Our evidence highlights that the competences and skills needed for the CE paradigm are in line with the technology intensive entrepreneurial process typical of the entrepreneurial venture incumbents and start-ups (Byers et al, 2011).…”

“…Recently, in the wake of the rapid development of new technologies, an expansion of EE to other disciplines and departments has been considered (ranging from humanities to engineering, from social science to biology) crucial for developing skills, competencies and mindsets required to launch and develop high-growth, technology-based businesses (Boocock et al, 2009;Secundo et al, 2020). Significant growth in the curricula and programmes devoted to entrepreneurship and new venture creation arises among all sectors, and in all levels of education and for students in different fields, including humanities, arts and creative studies (Ndou et al, 2018) as well as in the domain of engineering, high-tech, advanced technologies (Miranda et al, 2020;Secundo et al, 2020). Furthermore, expected skills and competencies to face the challenges of the CE (Ferraro et al, 2015), may vary significantly, depending on whether the students are young graduates or experienced managers, prospect designers or prospect policy-makers, etc.…”

A study of online entrepreneurship education under conditions of a pandemic

“…According to Ayed (2020), entrepreneurial education and innovativeness can evoke entrepreneurial intention. Miranda et al (2020) analyze the entrepreneurship education in the context of multidisciplinary collaboration: sociology, psychology, philosophy, business, and engineering education. Johann et al (2020) argue that design thinking is a relatively new methodology in the context of the entrepreneurship education but nonetheless a very important tool for developing entrepreneurial skills when incorporated into the education system.…”

Transformando la formación de ingenieros emprendedores

“…A través de un análisis de la literatura existente (Miranda, Goñi, Berhane & Carberry, 2020), aunado a la propia experiencia en el aula, se consideraron tres grandes problemáticas que no estaban siendo abordadas en los modelos tradicionales de enseñanza en la educación emprendedora: 1) Emprendimiento, se promueve en la práctica o solo se teoriza; 2) La descontextualización del emprendimiento; y, 3) Dominio y especificidad en la educación emprendedora. A fin de cubrir estas problemáticas, es necesario la adopción de metodologías activas y de real inmersión en el pensamiento de diseño, para que el estudiante pueda promover su formación práctica, contextualizando el contenido teórico y dominando el grado de especificidad necesario según sea el caso.…”