Conference Session

Student Entrepreneurial Skills and Mindset I

Collection

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Judith Giordan, National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance (NCIIA); Angela Shartrand, National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance (NCIIA); Joseph Steig, National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) and VentureWell; Phil Weilerstein, VentureWell

Tagged Divisions

Entrepreneurship & Engineering Innovation

[31].A 1996 work by Lee [32] concluded that U.S. academics in the 1990s were more favorablydisposed than in the 1980s toward closer university-industry collaboration, but were concernedabout the impact of close university-industry cooperation, which was viewed as likely tointerfere with academic freedom—the freedom to pursue long-term, disinterested, fundamentalresearch. The findings indicated the challenge to creating the right balance between these twocompeting concerns. The NSF report “Impact of Transformative Interdisciplinary Research andGraduate Education on Academic Institutions” cited the need for institutional support of faculty,new mechanisms for promotion and tenure collaborations, and better ways of organizing theinstitution to

Conference Session

Student Entrepreneurial Skills and Mindset I

Collection

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Kenneth Reid, Ohio Northern University; Daniel Michael Ferguson, Purdue University, West Lafayette

Tagged Divisions

Entrepreneurship & Engineering Innovation

students, which are included among necessary entrepreneurial skill sets, andunderstand how and why these skill sets change over their undergraduate matriculation.Our research will report on an initial study of the impact of first-year engineering courses on thechanges in entrepreneurial mindsets of first year engineering students. Entrepreneurial mindset inour study is operationally defined as a more growth orientated mindset versus a fixed orientatedmindset. This operational definition and the accompanying mindset measurement instrument wasdeveloped and validated by Carol Dweck of Stanford University. Based on Dweck‟s researchresults we assume a growth mindset is a reasonable surrogate for a student engineer‟s creativeand innovative or