Zhu, H., & Mertz, B. E. (2017, June), Work In Progress: Incorporation of the Entrepreneurial Mindset into the Introduction to Engineering Course  Paper presented at 2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Columbus, Ohio. 10.18260/1-2--29164

\bibitem{asee_peer_29164}
  Zhu, H., \& Mertz, B. E. (2017, June), \emph{Work In Progress: Incorporation of the Entrepreneurial Mindset into the Introduction to Engineering Course}
  Paper presented at 2017 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Columbus, Ohio.
  10.18260/1-2--29164

Haolin Zhu and Benjamin Emery Mertz.  "Work In Progress: Incorporation of the Entrepreneurial Mindset into the Introduction to Engineering Course".  2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Columbus, Ohio, 2017, June.  ASEE Conferences, 2017.  https://peer.asee.org/29164 Internet.  17 Apr, 2024

\bibitem{asee_peer_29164}
  Haolin Zhu and Benjamin Emery Mertz.
  "Work In Progress: Incorporation of the Entrepreneurial Mindset into the Introduction to Engineering Course".
  \emph{2017 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Columbus, Ohio, 2017, June}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2017.
  https://peer.asee.org/29164 Internet.  17 Apr, 2024

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_29164
author = "Haolin Zhu and Benjamin Emery Mertz"
title = "Work In Progress: Incorporation of the Entrepreneurial Mindset into the Introduction to Engineering Course"
booktitle = "2017 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition"
year = "2017"
month = "June"
address = "Columbus, Ohio"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/29164}
number = {10.18260/1-2--29164}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Work In Progress: Incorporation of the Entrepreneurial Mindset into the Introduction to Engineering Course


This Work In Progress paper will describe changes made to three first year Introduction to Engineering courses in order to promote the entrepreneurial mindset. Technical skillset alone is not sufficient for engineering students to address the societal challenges. According to the 2015 National Academy of Engineering (NAE)’s report Educate to Innovate [1], the development of critical thinking skills as well as an innovative and entrepreneurial mindset is equally important. In order to meet the needs of the global economy, besides emphasizing technical skills, engineering curriculum should incorporate content and activities that promote the entrepreneurial mindset (EM) and the best time to start this is during the freshman year. This, however, is not the same as teaching entrepreneurship or preparing entrepreneurs. According to Kriewall and Mekemson [2], “an entrepreneurial minded engineer (i.e., an engineer instilled with the entrepreneurial mindset) places product benefits before design features and leverages technology to fill unmet customer needs”. Skills associated with the entrepreneurial mindset include: effective communication (verbal, written, graphical), teamwork, ethics and ethical decision-making, customer awareness, persistence, creativity, innovation, time management, critical thinking, global awareness, self-directed research, life-long learning, learning through failure, tolerance for ambiguity, and estimation [3]. In order to prepare more engineering students with such skills, the Kern Family Foundation has established the Kern Entrepreneurial Education Network (KEEN), a network of institutions that are committed to changing their pedagogy to develop entrepreneurial mindset in undergraduate engineers, that is built on the principle of “the Three C’s” [4]: Curiosity -  demonstrate constant curiosity about our changing world & explore a contrarian view of accepted solutions; Connections - integrate information from many sources to gain insight & assess and manage risk; Creating Value - identify unexpected opportunities to create extraordinary value & persist through and learn from failure.

This paper will discuss three approaches of using team based hands-on design projects to incorporate the Three C’s in the first year Introduction to Engineering courses at [Institution], one of the institutions in the network. One of the projects involves fictional customers, acted by the teaching team, and a fictional scenario. The second one is based on a real world problem and a real world location that most students are not familiar with, and students do not have easy access to the customers, therefore, they rely on extensive online research. The third one offers opportunities for students to interact with real world customers throughout the design process. This paper will compare these three different approaches and discuss observations of early outcomes, in the form of excerpts from students’ design notebooks, reflections, and project reports.  Specifically, these excerpts will be used to evaluate whether the type of interactions with “customers” influences how a student demonstrates the Three C’s in their project.





References

[1] "Front Matter." National Academy of Engineering. Educate to Innovate: Factors That Influence Innovation: Based on Input from Innovators and Stakeholders. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2015.

[2] Kriewall, T. J., and Mekemson, K., "Instilling the entrepreneurial mindset into engineering undergraduates." in The Journal of Engineering Entrepreneurship, 1.1, pp 5-19, 2010.

[3] Gerhart, A. L., Carpenter, D.D., Fletcher, R.W., Meyer, E.G, “Combining discipline-specific introduction to engineering courses into a single multi-discipline course to foster the entrepreneurial mindset with entrepreneurially minded learning”, in ASEE, the proceedings of, Indianapolis, IN, 2014

[4]http://engineeringunleashed.com/keen/


AU  - Haolin Zhu
AU  - Benjamin Emery Mertz
CY  - Columbus, Ohio
DA  - 2017/06/24
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Work In Progress: Incorporation of the Entrepreneurial Mindset into the Introduction to Engineering Course
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/29164
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--29164
ER  -