Supporting Change in Entrepreneurship Education: Creating a Faculty Development Program Grounded in Results from a Literature Review

摘要

The goal of the Engineering Pathways to Innovation Center (Epicenter), an NSF-funded partnership between Stanford University and the National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance (NCIIA), is to enable engineering programs at institutions across the U.S. to develop effective and accessible innovation and entrepreneurship offerings for undergraduate engineering students. To achieve this goal, Epicenter staff members are creating the multi-year, team-based Pathways to Innovation program to support institutional change and faculty development by embedding entrepreneurship and innovation education into formal and informal undergraduate engineering curriculums in higher education. During the summer of 2013, Epicenter engaged Broad-based Knowledge, LLC to conduct an independent literature review to identify promising models and practices that could guide the design and implementation of the Pathways program, specifically on the topics of faculty development and change in higher education. Since then, Epicenter staff members have incorporated the recommendations from the literature review into the design of the Pathways program, which plans to launch in January 2014. This paper reports findings and recommendations from the literature review, synthesizes the recommendations with design decisions, and provides examples of how the decisions have been realized in components of the Pathways program. Finally, the conclusion offers reflections on the design process from Epicenter staff members as they balance implementing the (sometimes overwhelming number of) promising practices from the literature.