Entrepreneurship in electrical engineering education

The program in entrepreneurship education offered by the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) has as one of its courses a senior-level undergraduate course which takes a hands-on approach to teaching electrical engineering students the concepts of innovation and entrepreneurship. The basic goal is for students to experience the product development process as well as how to start a new company. The students are separated into groups and form companies known as E-teams. They generate a few product ideas, evaluate them and choose one to explore, develop the product idea into a functional prototype, and finally perform market/financial analysis to determine if the product could sustain an actual business. Once they have completed this process, the E-teams present all of their findings at a final presentation to faculty members and guests from the private industry sector. The idea is for the E-teams to experience an actual start-up process and attempt to take it to the point of soliciting financial support. While they negotiate the product development process, the E-teams are given a wide variety of lectures that provide them with valuable insight into being both effective engineers and entrepreneurs. The class fits into the engineering curriculum by offering students a capstone course, i.e. one that ties their entire college education together. This class has been extended to include MBA majors from the College of Business at UNR. This paper describes the format, content and results of teaching the class.