TEACHING ENGINEERING INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP EARLY IN THE CURRICULUM

Innovation and entrepreneurship are essential components of the skill set that engineering graduates entering the modern competitive and global workplace must possess. Here, a new course in Engineering Innovation and Entrepreneurship, intended for freshmen and sophomores, is described. The goal of the course is twofold: First, we seek to introduce students to the broader context of engineering and to develop a mindset where students accept commercialization as a natural part of the introduction of new technologies. Second, we provide students with a "toolbox" of skills with which to understand the business world and assess the commercial contexts and viability of new technologies. The course was developed with funding from the Kern Family Foundation's KEEN program. It is agreed by those pondering the future of engineering education 1-4 that innovation and entrepreneurship (I & E) must be part of the skill set that graduates entering the modern, competitive global workplace must possess. At our institution—Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)—and many other educational institutions, engineering students interested in innovation and entrepreneurship have several opportunities to pursue their interests; However, only a small fraction of students usually take advantage of these opportunities. We believe that the reasons to be that students generally do not yet appreciate the close relationship between engineering and entrepreneurship, and students do not understand the role of commercialization in engineering innovation. In an effort to raise student awareness, we recently developed a course intended to introduce students to I & E early in their curriculum, with intentions to encourage them see the more technical part of the curriculum in a broader context and to motivate them to take advantage of opportunities to pursue innovation and entrepreneurship during their course of studies. The success stories of engineers turned entrepreneurs—Gates at Microsoft, Jobs at Apple, Brin and Page at Google, Dell at Dell, Kamen at DEKA, Zuckerberg at Facebook, Yang at Yahoo, Hewlett and Packard at HP, and many other youthful founders of successful companies—aside, the goal of the course is not to encourage all students taking it to found their own companies upon graduation. The course's intent is to foster an entrepreneurial mindset in every graduate and to raise students' awareness that commercialization is part of the technological innovation process. No nifty technology is worth much unless it is put to use. We hold the view that engineering is the discipline concerned with the creation of our physical world, (see figure 1), and that all engineering graduates must understand that identifying the use for a new technology, including identifying users who need it, finding support for new technology development, and taking it to market, is part of the engineering enterprise. Students must also learn that they should expect to be responsible for any aspect of the development process.