Intrapreneurship: A Collaborative Learning Approach Between Industry and Academics to Build Critical Skills

Most of the students engaging in entrepreneurship at engineering schools will not start their own businesses as their first employment. Most will enter industry. The challenge to use their entrepreneurial interests and skills then resides in their abilities to innovate, engage, communicate and lead in an industrial environment to identify and pursue new opportunities and directions for these organizations. Building on an extensive study 1 conducted with a team comprised of faculty from four leading colleges, and encompassing an industrial advisory group composed of leaders from ten companies spanning large material based corporations to large consumer products goods companies to recognized world class innovation companies, this paper will describe the collaborative process used to identify the areas noted as most critical for intrapreneurship, and the recommended next steps to develop skills in these areas through engineering education. The T-shaped engineer and T-shaped skills, that address several of the key areas, will be used to illustrate both curricula-based and non-curricula-based educational opportunities. This will include a new collaborative internship with specific metrics to ensure that the industrial experience embraces, tests for, and collaboratively measures the progress in the development of the intrapreneurial skill.