Lessons Learned through Sequential Offerings of an Innovation and Entrepreneurship Boot Camp for Sophomore Engineering Students

We provide an overview of the development and assessment of two subsequent offerings of a sophomore-level engineering innovation and entrepreneurship boot camp. The boot camp focused on the development of entrepreneurial mindset skills through the provision of curricular content on idea generation and the customer’s role in the design and technology transfer process. Students also participated in an experiential component which involved an iterative design process culminating in a business pitch made to a panel of faculty and entrepreneurship community members. Entrepreneurial mindset is a term that has varied definitions based on the reference source. This paper provides an overview of these definitions and a basis for the entrepreneurial mindset development that was sought as part of this boot-camp experience. Results demonstrated that the bootcamp environment can successfully provide an environment for the learning of innovation and entrepreneurship concepts and lay the foundation for skill sets that can be further developed within students’ academic careers. 75% of student respondents thought the skills they initially identified as being important to innovation and entrepreneurship had changed as a result of the boot camp. Student perceptions of important innovation and entrepreneurship skills that had changed can be related back to the engineering viewpoint of the entrepreneurial mindset. Specifically, creativity and customer focus were stated most frequently as skills that had changed. In addition, the “muddiest points” related to innovation and entrepreneurship were reported by 97% of participants to have been made “clearer” as a result of the boot camp.