Experiential Entrepreneurship Activities Enhance Florida Tech's Engineering Management Graduate Program

Four courses that form the Innovative Systems Engineering Entrepreneurship Course series in The Engineering Management Program at Florida Tech – Systems Engineering Entrepreneurship, Technical Marketing, High Tech Product Strategy and Technology Commercialization Strategies have seen increasing enrollment at Florida Tech, due to the increasing job opportunities and exposure to the community that the students get as a result of the experiential activities offered by these courses. These experiential activities include the monthly “Engineering Entrepreneur in the Spotlight” seminar series – where promising engineers-turnedentrepreneurs visit Florida Tech and share their experiences; the judging of the Brevard School Science Fair Projects for their commercialization value; collaborating with the city, government and private organizations in the community to commercialize innovative student-developed technologies; etc. Students work in E-Teams on their entrepreneurial class projects and write NCIIA/SBIR grant proposals for funding and also present at the regional/state-level Business Plan Competitions. They are also members of the Florida Tech Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) Club and they participate in local and national SIFE competitions. All these activities give the Engineering Management students enough exposure in the community so that they are often recruited out of class to work on critical projects in the industry. In this paper the various attributes of this holistic entrepreneurship program are discussed and highlighted. .