Team Negotiation Strategies in Entrepreneurship Education: Patterns Found in Engineering Students from Northern California and Santiago de Chile

A new way of doing engineering is rising. Particularly, accreditation criteria and local demands are requiring schools of engineering to transform engineering education by embracing entrepreneurship and innovation. Students need to be more prepared to address challenges of the industry through effective engineering design process. Nonetheless, we expect teams of students to be able to overcome friction in any entrepreneurial endeavor with little or no instruction on how to work and orchestrate dissonance. This paper showcases context sensitive qualitative information from a team negotiation study conducted in two educational settings in North and South America. We describe two bottom-up negotiation strategies that become a shared pattern between the two research sites. Additionally, both group of students described a new mindset for doing things and solving real problems. Being comfortable with ambiguity is an emergent expected outcome from a new way of teaching and learning engineering. A convergence in the negotiation patterns is expected from collecting information in other research sites. The techniques are visual in nature and have the potential to be transferrable as concrete tools for a universal framework for any engineering design curriculum. Introduction The importance of integrating team-building strategies into the engineering curricula concerns universities around the world. Not only engineering accreditation agencies are requiring teamwork assessment, but the professional workplace is expecting graduates that are prepared to be productive in cross-functional teams. From an innovation point of view, team negotiation strategies are crucial for engineering design. Negotiation techniques entail the ways that individuals deliberate, discuss or communicate in order to achieve a particular temporary or long term agreement or consensus. In this line, Hargadon and Bechky (2006) propose a model of innovation where problem solving is addressed by group interaction, as opposed to just one individual effort. Negotiation techniques are needed in order to recombine past experiences of different individuals, and lead to new insights. Nonetheless, engineering schools often dismiss teaching negotiation techniques that might be relevant for developing high performance teams. Techniques for achieving temporary settlements are relevant to engineering students’ training. Innovation driven projects usually have to work with ambiguity. Teams that manage multiple points of view are more prepared to face that challenge because they allow the existence of healthy conflict. Although the interest in Project Based Learning (PBL) courses has increased, the assessment of conflict and the capacity of taming uncertainty remains as an unresolved issue in most engineering curricula. In order to allow the recombination of ideas to happen and keep the differences that drive innovation, engineering students need to improve their efficacy in working together within diverse perspectives and ambiguous challenges. According to our experience in industry and academia, we had repeatedly seen that teams used certain artifacts to bridge communication amongst its members. These identifiable objects were coined as Boundary Objects (BOs) by Star and Griesemer in 1989. BOs are flexible artifacts that can live in the intersection of different knowledge worlds without losing their identity. They facilitate communication among groups, besides enabling particular negotiation spaces called trading zones. In this paper, we ascribe to the idea that boundary objects and trading zones empowers diverse teams to embrace innovative design and entrepreneurial efforts. This paper reports a context-sensitive study of team negotiation in two educational settings. It describes team negotiation patterns evidenced on a nearly one-year ethnographic research in a top ranked university in Northern California. Data is qualitative and rich in detail, in order to theorize from praxis and bridge gaps in teamwork literature. In order to see if the negotiation patterns were similar 9,507 km south from Northern California, we studied a similar group in Santiago de Chile. Based on the idea of boundary objects and trading zones, we identified techniques that were used in both educational settings to achieve temporary settlements while going from divergent tasks to convergent ones. Although these results are not conclusive, these techniques contribute to engineering education by informing how future engineers could be more prepared for joining the workforce or starting their own business. Future work may involve doing more case studies in other contexts. Engineering design and negotiation for a comprehensive entrepreneurial curricula For a long time, the common focus of engineering education was on an established model (based on the Grinter report of 1956) where the craft of engineering is imparted only after the students have gained a strong basis in mathematics and science. Whether this is the current case or not, even conventional curriculum relies heavily on the design process, as most of the sub-disciplines in engineering require the practicality of design skills in modeling and converting ideas into realities. Additionally, ABET (specialized accreditation agency for programs for engineering worldwide) has encouraged the existence of capstone project-based courses to ensure that graduates are prepared for real-world, practical applications of engineering principles in industry. Beyond the importance of science and mathematics fundamentals, global efforts are changing engineering education by emphasizing professional skills and active learning. In 1997, ABET changed to an outcomes-based approach known as Engineering Criteria (EC) 2000. The implementation of the EC2000 not only transformed engineering schools, but also engineering classrooms across the world. Early studies have explored how individual professors integrate what students need to attain regarding the needs of the industry with their course assessment. Later on, Lattuca, Terenzini and Volkwein (2006) found further evidence of the impact of EC2000 on student experiences and learning outcomes. Today, because of EC2000, communication skills and multidisciplinary teamwork need to be embodied in any learning process. Thus, engineering design activities and project-based learning has become strategic for many engineering schools. There have been serious attempts to make engineering design a systematic discipline. In the United States, it started with the work of individuals like Henry Dreyfuss on ergonomics in the ‘50s and individuals like Horst Rittel and Bruce Archer in the ‘60s at Berkeley RCA. Later on, user-centered approaches emerged in the Bay Area from Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), one of the biggest exponents of this trend. Today it seems design is in one of its most evident pivot points as an enabler of innovation and multidisciplinary work in modern organizations and startups. Fast paced advances in technology and organic growth of communication systems have resulted in a kind of micro-segmented global network, so now problems have become more and more ill-defined and multi-layered. Nonetheless, the instruction of these new design abilities is not always organized or methodic. In Chile, engineering design has recently become crucial regarding the New Engineering 2030 initiative, launched by the National Agency for Innovation and Development (CORFO) in 2013. By financing strategic plans of the country’s leading engineering schools, CORFO intends to transform engineering education towards national competitiveness and productivity. In order to educate future engineers that are more prepared to address the challenges of the industry, engineering schools need to incorporate more teamwork, hands on learning, and practical experience within the industry. Moreover, an entrepreneurial spirit is supposed to be developed in any project-based course, so students become more inspired with technology development and product design. For Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC), New Engineering 2030 has been the opportunity to validate existing efforts to create an innovative and entrepreneurial curriculum. Since 2013, the Engineering Design and Innovation major (www.di-lab.cl) has imparted projectbased courses that prepare students to: 1. be comfortable with ambiguity and ill-defined challenges, 2. be able to overcome team conflict , 3. acquire critical thinking and problem solving capabilities with a bias on making, 4. focus on people-driven innovation, 5. manage information through visual thinking strategies, 6. and adapt to a fast moving world. Engineering design is a learning discipline that has been discussed over decades. Design strategies not only address the embellishment of an artifact, but also the process behind defining meaningful stages for services, systems and experiences. This form of the design process has become key to entrepreneurship since it is a way to make ideas and future realities tangible to others. However, more research is needed in order to understand how it could be easily integrated within an engineering curriculum. Today, engineers not only need to demonstrate technical excellence in the application of science, mathematics and engineering principles, but also require effective ways to understand individuals involved in any entrepreneurial venture. The design process, as a social process, is effective in involving the end-user, end-customer and even understanding the aim of potential investors. This study provides a new perspective for understanding how engineering students diverge and converge in a design process conducted in different educational settings. Thus, more innovative teaching methods are implemented along the expectations of global and local agencies.