A Systematic Review of Student Entrepreneurial Failure in Engineering Education

This paper specifically focuses on a systematic review of research on and pedagogical methods related to failure within the context of undergraduate and graduate entrepreneurial engineering curriculum and programming. The article examines the basis for, methods to teach, and research being done to support the commonly held and repeated beliefs that students learn through failure, entrepreneurs need to persist through failure, and we need to teach our students to fail fast and fail forward. Systematic reviews of literature enable fields to collate research findings, highlight areas of interest and research activity, summarize areas where various viewpoints and research results are being debated, and identify potential areas of interest for further work to advance a particular field. Systematic reviews also provide a succinct opportunity to summarize the state of the art in a field, providing researchers a base of foundational work to support future advances in the field. Given the rapid increase and interest within colleges of engineering in introducing and exposing students to entrepreneurial curriculum and experiences, and the corresponding increase in research and publication in this space, it is timely to pursue systematic reviews on entrepreneurship within engineering education. While the importance of learning from failure is often repeated in the literature, this article highlights a glaring lack of research on the topic within the context of engineering education, and pedagogical approaches that are being used to attempt to teach students these concepts.