'It was a Failure, But a Good Failure': A Qualitative Study Exploring Engineering Students' Critical Entrepreneurship Experiences and Their Impacts

Integrating entrepreneurship into engineering education has gained momentum in recent years. Engineering students at many institutions now have access to a variety of mediums to get involved in entrepreneurship including classes, pitch competitions, and accelerator programs. Participating in these classes or programs can lead to engineering students getting very involved in entrepreneurship and having important, memorable experiences. This study sought to investigate these ‘critical’ entrepreneurship experiences among engineering students including the impacts they have. The study applied the critical incident technique in a narrative format to elicit and thoroughly investigate three senior engineering student’s entrepreneurship experiences who were very involved in advancing multiple entrepreneurial projects during their undergraduate education. The study reports these critical experiences and their impacts in a narrative format with rich detail. The findings suggest that entrepreneurship funding programs and classes are primarily involved in catalyzing powerful student experiences that have profound effects including changes in attitudes, behavior, and altered career goals. This study overall provides evidence of the value programs and classes have in facilitating the development of an entrepreneurial mindset. Introduction Formal entrepreneurship programs (e.g., majors, minors, and certificates) targeting undergraduate students have quadrupled from 1975 to 2006, making it one of the fastest growing subjects overall (Brooks et al., 2007). There has specifically been a movement to integrate entrepreneurship into engineering education. The NSF and other funding agencies including the Kern Family Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation, VentureWell and the Lemelson Foundation have invested significantly in promoting entrepreneurship and innovation in engineering education (Duval-Couetil, Shartrand, & Reed, 2016a). This movement has also been supported by professional organizations such as the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) (Duval-Couetil, Reed-Rhoads, & Haghighi, 2012). The setting of this study, Arizona State University (ASU), is an excellent example of an institution that has invested heavily into developing an entrepreneurship ecosystem. There are many funding programs that award students anywhere from $1,000 to $100,000 to advance their entrepreneurial endeavor. Many of these funding programs and classes are specifically for engineering. The intent behind these programs is often times not just for students to start successful businesses, but to develop more well-rounded engineers with a variety of knowledge and skills that possess an ‘entrepreneurial mindset’. Considering the significant financial and time investments involved in the creation of entrepreneurship programs, institutional funding competitions, and accelerator programs, it is notable that there are no in-depth, qualitative studies that explore the entrepreneurship experiences students have because of these programs. In general, there is very little research on the personal impacts of these experiences including how they can affect an engineering student’s attitudes, behaviors, career goals, or personal competence (Duval-Coetil, Reed-Rhoads, & Haghighi, 2011). There is also no consensus on what developing an ‘entrepreneurial mindset’ means. This study builds off current literature in addressing these gaps by exploring the ‘critical’ entrepreneurship experiences of engineering students at ASU with a well-developed entrepreneurship ecosystem. The purpose of this study is to paint a picture of the types of important student experiences that are catalyzed from the creation of institutional entrepreneurship programs and the impacts these experiences have on a student including on their attitudes, behaviors, and career goals. In doing so, it also seeks to provide rich data on what it means to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and the implications of it. The research questions are thus twofold: Research Question 1: What are the types of critical entrepreneurship experiences engineering students have? Research Question 2: What was the impact of these critical entrepreneurship experiences? The findings discuss, in a narrative format, the most important entrepreneurship experiences three senior engineering students had while attempting to advance their respective entrepreneurial projects. The findings suggest that these experiences had profound effects on each student including changes in attitudes and altered career goals. Patterns within the narratives suggest these changes in attitude are within the categories of communication, pitching, working on a team, networking, and the design process. Other attitudes that were developed or were more innately possessed and tested through the experiences include risk-taking, the desire to make an impact, passion, curiosity, and confidence. These attitudes appear to make an impact on behavior including the ability to identify opportunities, make connections, and create value. These specific changes in attitudes and behavior point to the development of an entrepreneurial mindset. This experiences overall had a major influence on all three students’ career aspirations. None of these students had entrepreneurial-related intentions prior to college, which makes the findings all the more interesting.