Teaching Entrepreneurial Thinking Through a Companion Course for All Types of Capstone Senior Design Projects

摘要

Entrepreneurial thinking is recognized as important to the engineering curriculum; however, the typical entrepreneurship course is not applicable to all senior design projects, especially those from civil engineering. We recognized that product-based entrepreneurship courses need to be expanded and more flexible. Therefore, we have developed and implemented Senior Innovation, a companion course to senior design that focuses on entrepreneurial thinking in engineering design. Our main focus is to ensure students can communicate the value of their design - be it a product, service design, process design, or competition entrant - and develop and deliver an elevator pitch in our university-wide pitch competition. Before we implemented Senior Innovation, certain disciplines, such as civil engineering, were left out of competing in our pitch competition, because they did not produce a physical product. Based on recent assessment data, we can conclude that 85 percent of engineering students, and 88 percent of civil engineering students, believe they can identify and communicate value through an elevator pitch after having taken Senior Innovation. This confirms that our course is valuable to all engineering disciplines and can be applied to all service design, process design, and competition entrants, as well as product-based senior design projects. This paper focuses on the creation of the companion course, Senior Innovation, and the learning objectives and methods used to teach entrepreneurial thinking, as well as assessment data and examples of how the course applies to non-product-based senior design projects.