Integrating Entrepreneurship into Capstone Design: An Exploration of Faculty Perceptions and Practices

Incorporating entrepreneurship into the engineering curriculum is compelling for many reasons. Entrepreneurship education has been found to boost GPA and retention rates of engineering students, provides students with the skills and attitudes needed to innovatively contribute to existing organizations and pursue their own ventures, and has the potential to address current and anticipated workforce demands. Entrepreneurship is taught most effectively using experiential methods. Given that Capstone design courses are applied and experiential by nature, they provide an optimal context for integrating entrepreneurship into engineering education. Indeed, Ochs et al. illustrated ways to integrate entrepreneurship into Capstone while simultaneously adhering to ABET standards. Shartrand and Weilerstein also identified various practices for incorporating entrepreneurship into Capstone design courses, and identified traditional and entrepreneurial Capstone elements. However, it is unclear what Capstone design instructors actually practice in this area. To better understand how and to what degree entrepreneurial elements are integrated into Capstone design classes, 225 Capstone design faculty were surveyed with an instrument designed using the entrepreneurial Capstone practices described by Shartrand and Weilerstein. The survey sample included attendees of the bi-annual Capstone Design Conference, VentureWell grantees, Epicenter Pathways to Innovation team members and Pathways referrals. An explanatory multiphase mixed methods design was used involving the collection of quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative data illustrate the extent to which faculty incorporate different entrepreneurial practices in their Capstone design courses and how important faculty believe it is to increase different entrepreneurial practices in Capstone design. The qualitative survey data provide additional insight about how faculty incorporate different entrepreneurial practices in their Capstone design courses and the challenges (perceived and actual) to implementing entrepreneurially focused Capstones. These challenges can be summarized into three overarching themes: 1) the Capstone tradition; 2) faculty exposure and experience; and 3) university culture and support. Implications, limitations, and future research are also discussed.