Developing and Assessing Students' Entrepreneurial Skills and Mind-Set*

Journal of Engineering Education, Apr 2005 by Bilén, Sven G, Kisenwether, Elizabeth C, Rzasa, Sarah E, Wise, John C

ABSTRACT

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.

Keywords: engineering entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship program assessment, entrepreneurial skills

I. INTRODUCTION

The Pennsylvania State University's (Penn State's) Engineering Entrepreneurship (E-SHIP) Minor is housed within the College of Engineering and operates in close collaboration with both the Smeal College of Business and the School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) [1]. The broad goals of the E-SHIP minor are to provide students with multiple exposures to what it means to have an entrepreneurial mindset and to facilitate the development of both the passion and the ambiguity-management skills needed for new product or venture creation. The expected outcomes of the minor include an increase in motivation; improvement of communication, leadership, and teamwork skills; development of problem solving and innovative thinking skills; and a better understanding of business and financial knowledge. Research into and assessment of students' growth in these skills and aptitudes are critical for three reasons. First, the skills listed above can be mapped directly onto the ABET Engineering Criterion 3 [2]. Success in entrepreneurship education means success in achieving Criterion 3's challenging goals. Second, as the population of young, bright engineers grows in developing countries-where their salaries are typically lower than U.S. engineering salaries by a factor of five or so-corporations must perceive the value of retaining engineering jobs in the U.S. Engineers with the skills developed in this program will be of high value as corporate innovators as well as technical leaders. In addition, improved entrepreneurial skills such as commercializing technology should lead to significant economic development benefits to corporations and the U.S. economy as a whole. Finally, the faculty and administrations in engineering programs across the U.S. are launching new courses in technology entrepreneurship, often in collaboration with other disciplines such as business, liberal arts, and science. Membership in the Entrepreneurship Division of ASEE has grown from less than 20 in 2000 to over 500 members in 2004. Such rapid growth in a new area of engineering education should be researched and assessed.

Penn State's Engineering E-SHIP Minor is part of a growing movement of technology-focused entrepreneurship programs. Led by the early and well-known program innovators at Stanford University [3] and MIT [4], a broad spectrum of colleges and universities have developed strong undergraduate engineering entrepreneurship programs or courses, including Lehigh University [5], Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology [6], University of Maryland [7], University of Central Florida [8], Rowan University [9], Worchester Institute of Technology [10] and Tri-State University [11]. Smaller colleges and universities, such as the University of Kansas-Salina, are also creating innovative grass-roots engineering entrepreneurship programs, showing that fostering student interest in entrepreneurship before establishing courses is a potential consensus-building approach leading to a mindset change for students and faculty.

A common feature across these engineering entrepreneurship programs, including Penn State's, is their cross-disciplinary and the desire to focus their curricula and learning on technology entrepreneurship rather than a more general entrepreneurship program that may be offered by a business school alone.

Penn State's Engineering Entrepreneurship Minor and related programs were designed in early 2001 using four inputs:

* a review of technology-focused entrepreneurship curricula and programs across the U.S., such as the ones listed above;

* suggestions and insights from experienced local technology entrepreneurs and from entrepreneur panels at meetings such as the REE (Roundtable for Entrepreneurship Education) Conferences held at yearly at Stanford University [12] ;

* the need to make wise re-use of selected existing Penn State courses; and