Paper Authors

Abstract

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

Entrepreneurs in Action!: An On-line Cross-discipline Problem-based Learning Environment for Entrepreneurship

R. Wilburn Clouse, Ph.D. Vanderbilt University

Introduction

Many of the more aggressive colleges/universities across the country are engaging in some form of course work and/or experiences related to entrepreneurship education. Most of these efforts can be found either in the School of Business or the School of Engineering. Some schools offer one course in Entrepreneurship in order to acquaint students with the general field of entrepreneurship. Other schools may offer one or two more courses to further enhance the student's understanding of entrepreneurship. Still other colleges and universities offer a complete four-year degree program and/or master's degree or doctorate. Still, the vast majority of schools offer little or nothing to teach students about self-employment, creative thinking, and the process of generating new and creative ideas for opportunity development.

There are at least two general underlying assumptions about entrepreneurship education. Some schools, especially some schools of business, assume that entrepreneurship cannot be taught. To them, it is an inborn skill that is derived from your gene base. In these types of schools, students appear to be already either starting a company or have entrepreneurship tendencies. These schools emphasize more about how to develop a business venture and seek venture capitalists for funding. Corporate buy-outs are also an important feature of this approach. Generally speaking, some of these programs teach more about how to manage and develop a corporate environment than they do to seek new and different opportunities. Usually, these programs are single discipline focused.

In programs associated with schools of engineering, students are more frequently involved in innovation than they are in true entrepreneurship. The schools of engineering are usually great at teaching the technical concepts related to disciplines but frequently do not have courses that cut across technical subject areas, thus combining multiple subjects simultaneously. While there is a trend among schools of engineering to introduce selective courses that introduce entrepreneurship into the curriculum, it is usually taught as an entity within itself and does not involve cross-discipline activities.

The second approach is centered on the general concept that all students can learn, to some extent, to be creative and entrepreneurial. The focus of this approach is to be broad based, to take a cross-discipline approach, to be focused on seeing opportunities

“Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright ©2004, American Society for Engineering”

• Citation

• Format
  • APA
  • APA - LaTeX bibitem
  • MLA
  • MLA - LaTeX bibitem
  • Bibtex
  • EndNote - RIS

Clouse, W. (2004, June), Online Cross Discipline Problem Based Learning Environment For Entrepreneurship Paper presented at 2004 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--13251