THE INNOVATION INITIATIVE FOR SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP: FOSTERING AWARENESS OF GLOBAL AND SOCIAL ISSUES VIA ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION

摘要

The Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program is a team-based engineering design program that operates in a service-learning context. The undergraduates enrolled in this program earn academic credit for the real-world design work they perform and the professional skills they develop while creating products requested by non-profit organizations in their local community. The EPICS Entrepreneurship Initiative (EEI) was created in 2001 to enable EPICS teams to learn about entrepreneurship in the context of the innovative products and services that they create with their community partners. The culmination of the EEI's activities each year is the EPICS Idea-to-Product (I2P) Competition. In this product-feasibility competition, a panel of distinguished entrepreneurs listen to the EPICS e-teams' presentations about their products and determine which of their ideas have the greatest potential for both commercial sustainability and benefit to society. The educational and commercialization benefits of the EEI and its I2P Competition have led us to generalize them beyond EPICS to include all areas of engineering-focused social entrepreneurship. The EPICS I2P Competition has thus been extended to the National I2P for EPICS and Social Entrepreneurship by inviting e-teams with engineering-focused projects to participate in the competition along with EPICS teams. The first competition of this type took place in 2006 at San Jose State University; the next will take place in 2007 at Princeton University. The inclusion of non-EPICS teams has led us to change the name of the EPICS Entrepreneurship Initiative to the Innovation Initiative for Social Entrepreneurship (IISE).