Crowdfunding Campaign As a Design-Based Pedagogical Approach for Experiential Learning of Technology Entrepreneurship

Engineers are increasingly expected to master the knowledge and skills for entrepreneurship. Academic courses on entrepreneurship have been adopted in engineering schools around the world. However, the experiential learning of technology entrepreneurship remains challenging because it requires not only the experiences of ideation, design and prototyping in classrooms and fab labs but also broader engagement with users, manufacturers, marketers, and investors in business contexts. To conquer this challenge, we developed an approach to use an online crowdfunding campaign as a pedagogical approach to intensify the experiential learning of students in a technology entrepreneurship course. This approach, as part of a course module, provides a real-world context of uncertainty and resource constraints that characterize the entrepreneurship process, and it allows university students to discover and interact with actual users, investors, manufacturers and other stakeholders of their products around the world. We experimented with the use of a crowdfunding campaign as a pedagogical approach for experiential learning in the Entrepreneurship course at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). We found evidence of increased prototyping quality; learning intensity; empathy toward users, manufacturers, marketers and other stakeholders; and an increased interest in pursuing an entrepreneurial career.