Integration of Entrepreneurship Education into a Bioengineering Capstone Design Class

This paper presents a template for integrating entrepreneurship educational objectives into a twosemester multidisciplinary capstone design course that engages bioengineering students with business, science and engineering majors to collaboratively create a valuable technological solution (or product) with business potential. Bioengineering seniors enroll in this class for their senior design experience. An Integrated Design Engineering Assessment and Learning System (IDEALS) is utilized throughout the course to facilitate and assess learning outcomes. IDEALS instructional materials and assessments are structured to provide a general introduction to engineering in today’s world. The following are the learning outcomes for the class: 1. Dispositions toward increased confidence and mindset to recognize, evaluate and move toward opportunities. 2. Abilities to apply and defend business development processes to create a business concept for an envisioned solution that offers potential for a sustainable business investment. 3. Abilities to prepare and critically read financial documents, including a balance sheet, income statement, cash flow analysis and break even analysis. 4. Abilities to prepare to seek or obtain sources of capital applying knowledge about requirements and pros and cons of different sources of capital. 5. Abilities to apply knowledge about intellectual property to strategically create barriers to entry for competitors. 6. Abilities to plan and manage a design project to complete specified deliverables within allotted time and budget. 7. Abilities to organize, improve, and contribute effectively to a multidisciplinary project team. 8. Abilities to access, learn, process, and demonstrate knowledge competence to advance a team-based entrepreneurial engineering project. 9. Abilities to explain and demonstrate ethical and professional responsibility in the context of team interactions, class assignments, client interactions, and professional norms. 10. Abilities to communicate effectively in written and oral forms to teammates, project advisors, technical experts, and business investors; ability to accurately document learning, ideas, and achievements. 11. Abilities to apply and defend problem scoping and concept generation (design) processes to create a solution concept aligned with important stakeholder needs. 12. Abilities to evaluate social, economic, legal, and other conditions that impact success of the technological product locally and globally. 13. Abilities to evaluate and explain performance of solutions in the context of established technical specifications. 14. Abilities to deliver project products (design solution and business plan) judged credible by clients and others within the engineering and business professions. This capstone design course sequence has emerged from a decade of cross-college collaboration and refinement. Results are evidenced by greater entrepreneurial competencies of students, more business-ready technological products, and more substantive relationships with collaborators. Increasingly, the courses are managed to emulate business practice and operate on a rapid development cycle. This paper presents the following templates for establishing an entrepreneurial engineering capstone design course for bioengineering students: 1. Instructor and student composition for strong multidisciplinary entrepreneurial engineering project development 2. Project selection and team formation processes for strong projects and teams 3. Timeline for instruction and major project deliverables 4. Use of assessments to facilitate student learning and project development