The Shark Tank Experience: How Engineering Students Learn to Become Entrepreneurs

How can students learn to think like an entrepreneur, boost their creativity and aim at innovative success? Fostering creativity and entrepreneurship is not only a question of knowledge transfer, but has a lot to do with working with students’ personality, attitudes and–most important– courage. The research project “ELLI – Excellence in Teaching and Learning in Higher Engineering Education” funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research is focusing these questions and has developed a course concept that fosters engineering students’ creativity and entrepreneurial thinking. Based on the well-known television show “shark tank”, students have to generate ideas for successful start-up enterprises and prepare a pitch that is creative and personally convincing. Furthermore, students are asked to do “something unusual”. In this paper, we want to present the results and experiences made in the first two terms with this course concept. By applying the Business Model Canvas, the students were able to gain knowledge about designing of business models in particular and entrepreneurship in general. However, surprisingly, students showed difficulties in taking risks–even in the playful simulation of the pitches. They tried to avoid uncertainty, which is essential for being creative or being an entrepreneur. As a possible reason, the influence of engineering education at all is discussed.