A Pilot for Integrating Capstone Design with a Two-Semester Innovation & Entrepreneurship Course Sequence

A pilot program at Stevens Institute of Technology is described to integrate senior-year capstone engineering design with a two-semester course sequence that addresses innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E), these topics representing an evolving core thread in the curriculum to address the demands of 21 Century careers. The pilot has specifically addressed the challenges of doing this with multidisciplinary design projects. The pilot team comprised experienced capstone design coordinators from several disciplines together with faculty members who teach entrepreneurship. Separate multidisciplinary sections of the two-semester senior capstone design course had a lead faculty coordinator with other faculty advisers as consultants where appropriate from the disciplines involved in each of the projects. The two-course I&E sequence was integrated with the capstone design courses. Most importantly the senior project teams were scheduled into an I&E course section as a team to facilitate the capstone project integration with these courses. The courses strived to directly develop the relevant I&E concepts in the context of each design project. The paper discusses the significant challenges in implementing a coordinated approach, especially in the multidisciplinary context, including the need to meet program capstone outcomes and more recently achieve consistency across core outcomes in addition to those that are program specific. Student and faculty assessment of the pilot to date show good progress made but challenges remaining. A significant feature of this initiative is its goal to scale the approach to all engineering programs at the university. Introduction Engineering educators are challenged to prepare their students with the knowledge and competencies that will support success both in the immediate post-graduation period and also as the foundation for careers in the rapidly changing global environment in which these will be pursued. It is not sufficient to educate engineers just to be technically competent. Engineering curricula and the accreditation criteria for engineering programs have evolved to reflect this reality by demanding that an array of non-technical and contextual competences be addressed. One critical contextual domain is an understanding of the business context of engineering. For success in 21 Century careers students need more than just an appreciation of the business context, they need to understand and be able to contribute effectively to value generation, whether that be for the products or services of a company, to establish a new venture or increasingly for themselves as they compete to demonstrate their value in an increasingly international marketplace for technical skills. The context is one in which entrepreneurial thinking and competences will be a key success factor. In response we are seeing increasingly around the nation the inclusion of entrepreneurship into engineering curricula through various approaches, either directly through courses or modules, or integrated into a course or by offering a minor for a subset of motivated students. Byers & others have recently described this trend, its motivators and the approaches being taken by engineering programs. They point to student interest as a significant feature, referring for