Promoting the Entrepreneurial Mindset through Faculty Development

Our university is part of a group of about 20 universities that are seeking to improve our graduates’ capabilities by helping them to develop an entrepreneurial mindset while they are yet students. While technical knowledge is essential to engineering, engineers will be more likely to find success and personal fulfillment when they couple these skills with a mindset to create extraordinary value for others. This perspective is not innate to many students, but they can be exposed to these concepts using the curriculum, if faculty themselves know how to do this. This leads to the critical issue of appropriate faculty development. Our program is committed to this perspective. As a result of this, we added to the department’s undergraduate mission statement that our students “will be empowered by innovative problem-solving creativity and an entrepreneurial mindset”. To help our faculty we have created a multifaceted approach to development. We have monthly lunchtime seminars where people from other parts of campus come in and make presentations. In fall 2015 these presentations were on the topics of Curiosity, Connections, and Creating Value. At the end of each semester we have a 1⁄2 day workshop where outside experts come in and lead us in a discussion of some aspect of this topic. A major component of this development was the creation of an internal grant program called Innovators. These Innovators come to the December workshop to learn more about the subject. They then create modules in one of their courses that demonstrate some aspect of the entrepreneurial mindset. Once they complete the project they create documents to show others how these modules can be used. Once this is done they receive a small stipend. By emphasizing modules, rather than entire courses, our faculty create things that other faculty (both here and at other schools) can insert into existing courses. So far we have had 15 faculty members (about 40% of our total engineering faculty) create modules. Another six professors are in the process of creating modules. The degree of this involvement is helping to change the culture within our college concerning the important of helping our students develop an entrepreneurial mindset. Motivation and background This work has its origin in feedback from our college’s Board of Advocates. This is a group of practicing engineers, most of them alumni from our college’s engineering programs. Their recommendations led us to create an alternative two course sequence that combines engineering economics concepts and technical communication concepts in a creative way as the students solve real world engineering problems. We have reported about this as the 2010 and 2011ASEE meetings1,2 and at the 2008 NCIIA conference3. Our goal was to use this to introduce business concepts and an entrepreneurial mindset to our engineering students. One of the issues we faced was that we did not have the teaching capacity to do this course sequence for all of our students. If we could not put all of our students in this course sequence, we needed to develop alternative methods of accomplishing this goal. This has led us to create course modules in various courses through our KEEN Innovators program that will be discussed later in this paper. If we are to have long term impact upon students, we need to have a group of faculty who are committed to this goal and whom will include entrepreneurial mindset topics in many different courses. Many papers have been presented at ASEE conferences concerning the creation of course content that involves entrepreneurial topics. We have reported about the development of a network of schools4 and the creation of multi-university senior design projects5. We have also reported on relating entrepreneurial topics to community development6 and justice7. How ethics and entrepreneurial topics can be related was presented at a KEEN conference8. What characterizes most of this previous work is a concentration on course modules and course content. What is different about this current paper is that it concentrates on our efforts to change faculty members. Once faculty members have a commitment to the importance of developing an entrepreneurial mindset in our students, they will be motivated to create content that is appropriate to their classes. This papers describes ways in which we have used faculty development activities to promote teaching about an entrepreneurial mindset.