Engineers use both critical and creative thinking skills to apply their technical knowledge and develop solutions to both large- and small-scale problems. Many of these problems and their associated contexts necessitate innovative, novel ideas in order to make a meaningful and lasting impact. Because of this, creativity is an essential skill for engineering students to enhance through understanding theoretical underpinnings and developing skills and experience through deliberate practice. The creative process begins with the cultivation of curiosity and includes problem and opportunity identification, ideation, taking initiative to build and test an idea, and implementation, and there are a multitude of specific techniques that can be utilized in each of these phases. Existing creativity techniques and tools assist individuals, groups, and teams in enhancing their project efficiency and increasing the novelty and effectiveness of their ideas and implementation strategies. With the increasing prevalence and accessibility of generative AI, it is worth exploring how these applications might be utilized for idea generation and in the creative process.
This work describes a deliverable that includes the utilization of generative AI assigned to students within a graduate-level engineering course in creativity at a large university. Similar to the journals and sketches of famous creative individuals throughout history, the Creativity Portfolio is an individual assignment designed to facilitate students’ documentation of their discoveries, insights, inspirations, identified problems and opportunities for improvement, ideas, design details, and implementation strategies gained and developed throughout the semester. In a pilot modification to this assignment, students were asked to develop two distinct parts in their Portfolio: one part encouraged students to use a physical notebook and develop content without the use of digital references and tools while the other part necessitated the use of generative AI and inventive prompt creation to identify specific and unique problem statements and ideas. This work highlights the details of this assignment including the formal learning objectives, the purpose and justification for these changes, and initial lessons learned. By incorporating generative AI—a cutting-edge technology that is currently widely accessible to students—into an academic assignment focused on creative thinking, students can gain formal, facilitated experience in seeing both the opportunities and limitations of such tools.

Authored by
Dr. Keilin Jahnke (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

This work in progress describes how a bioengineering program has reached beyond faculty in engineering and related sciences to incorporate expertise and coursework from a broader set of disciplines with a direct impact student success. Those interdisciplinary networks – particularly from business, communication, and the university library – enhance innovation and entrepreneurship education in graduate engineering programs.
We present this from the perspective of a key representative of one of the non-engineering partner institutions, with a hope to provide insight for engineering program decisionmakers. The program described here is delivered through a series of courses, trainings, coaching, and experiential learning opportunities conducted through the bioengineering program’s facilities and directed by its faculty and administrators, but it relies on networks and programs developed and cultivated elsewhere in the university. In addition, those programmatic needs from bioengineering have helped shape course offerings in other parts of the university as students have sought outside expertise in developing broader expertise and insight into innovations based on basic and applied research.
Based on principles of and shared interest in effective design and best practices in communication, the program we describe reframes graduate student education from the first week that students arrive on campus. The program builds on an immersive boot camp, our Impact Week, and then leads into a term-long course in science communication and design thinking. In the next term students have the option of taking a business course in innovation and entrepreneurship led by a senior faculty member in the business school. In their third term, students are required to take a basic scientific writing course that is team taught by a senior faculty member from the journalism school. In subsequent terms they then focus on grant writing and have the option to go deeper in business school curriculum with an area of concentration focused on innovation and entrepreneurship.
As we have laid the groundwork of a formal course of study for bioengineering students in innovation and entrepreneurship, we find that students also engage faculty partners regularly for non-curricular-based opportunities, particularly around innovation, communication to underserved communities, and specific funding opportunities.

Authored by
Prof. Mark Blaine (University of Oregon) and Dr. Nathan Jacobs (University of Oregon)

This research project, conducted at an Ecuadorian university, aimed to address the need for developing collaborative entrepreneurship skills among students pursuing Technical Business Administration majors. The primary objective was to design a pedagogical framework that would effectively integrate these skills into the academic curriculum. During the students' education, it became apparent that there was a lack of structured guidance for cultivating essential entrepreneurial skills, which are critical for their professional careers. The study took place during the 2023-2024 academic year, involving 93 students. It focused on key aspects of collaborative competencies, such as leadership, team communication, and conflict resolution.
To assess the effectiveness of the proposed model, surveys were conducted before and after the implementation of the framework at a public university in Ecuador. The findings revealed a positive impact on the development of these collaborative skills, indicating that the framework significantly contributed to enhancing the students' entrepreneurial capabilities. This research offers a valuable methodological contribution for educators and researchers interested in promoting collaborative entrepreneurship, providing a solid foundation for improving students' professional preparedness in this field. The authors analyze the factors influencing the outcomes, outline potential next steps, and explore how academia can further incorporate entrepreneurship learning modules into technical curricula. The implications of this study extend to both research and practical applications, offering a pathway to better equip students with the necessary skills for collaborative entrepreneurship in their future careers.

Authored by
Blanca Esthela Moscoso (Affiliation unknown) and Dr. MiguelAndres Andres Guerra P.E. (Universidad San Francisco de Quito USFQ)

Given the central role of engineering in national economic development, it is expected that the next generation of engineers must be prepared to work in a global context by coupling their traditional engineering skillset with an entrepreneurial mindset (EM) which is a collection of mental habits that foster curiosity, the ability to make connections, and the ability to create value when engaging with engineering problems. To best support the growth of an EM in engineering students, researchers have begun to design and implement teaching practices geared towards instilling this mindset in their students. However, there is still a dearth of research on assessing teaching practices that provide support for integrating EM into engineering courses. Thus, this work in progress reports the initial efforts to design an engineering-specific teaching practices assessment tool to serve in a larger project that addresses engineering best teaching practices for EM development. We conducted a literature review of STEM teaching practices assessment instruments to identify potential instruments that could serve as the foundation for our EM infused engineering-specific teaching practices assessment tool. To cover the landscape of STEM education literature, an education-focused database, and a multidisciplinary database were searched using a combination of keywords logically organized with Boolean operators. The initial result from the database searches consisted of 131 peer-reviewed publications. Peer-reviewed publications written in English that reported using a teaching practices assessment tool were selected from the initial result list to be reviewed. After the selection process, 30 papers reporting teaching practices were identified. This literature review study listed the teaching practice assessment instruments reported in the selected documents and discussed their applicability to EM engineering teaching practices assessment. Comparing the types of teaching practice assessments, we identified that self-reporting teaching inventories offer a low-resource (personal and time) alternative to assess teaching practices through the lens of the instructor. Ultimately, this study leveraged existing research on STEM teaching practice assessment tools to develop one that furthers the integration of EM in engineering education.

Authored by
Mr. Marcus Melo de Lyra (The Ohio State University), Sherri Youssef (The Ohio State University), Peyton OReilly (The Ohio State University), Shukufe Rahman (The Ohio State University), Dr. Benjamin Ahn (The Ohio State University), and Dr. Adam R Carberry (The Ohio State University)

Work in Progress: Designing a Role Playing Game for an Astrobiology Course
Division: Entrepreneurship and Engineering Innovation (ENT)
Themes: #1 (Learning environments that foster innovation and entrepreneurship) and #3 (Cross campus collaboration beyond engineering)

This two year study of gamified learning environments that foster innovation in STEM courses will assess the impact of a role playing game (RPG) designed for an undergraduate astrobiology course at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). The beta version of the RPG entitled “Mission to Europa” was designed by undergraduates in an entrepreneurship elective course entitled INDS 430: Role Playing Game Design in the Fall of 2023. A collaborative team of students from mechanical engineering, computer science, biology, and game design were organized into a small “startup company” in three divisions: quest design, game mechanics, and game programming and media. They met regularly with their “client” - the professor of the astrobiology course - who described particular learning goals and assessments such as the previous midterm exam. Mission to Europa was then incorporated into the Spring 2024 Astrobiology course and managed by the game design students and game design professor.
Four of the ten game designers had experience as “dungeon masters” (DM’s) in various Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) game events, and they based the Mission to Europa mission on similar D&D game mechanics (including a crew “job application” that served as a D&D character sheet). Astrobiology students then embarked on a manned mission to gather water samples from beneath the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. They were challenged to select supplies and testing equipment for the spaceship, to engage in training exercises during the voyage to Europa, to deal with various emergency scenarios, to decide on the best landing site on Europa, and to gather and analyze samples for amino acid (or xeno amino acid) content. The final event of the RPG - analysis of samples - served as a final exam for the astrobiology students.
At the end of their semester, astrobiology students (who also represented various STEM majors at UMBC, including biochemistry, computer science, and mechanical engineering) offered feedback to both the game design and astrobiology professors.
The astrobiology course will be offered again in Spring 2025 with a redesigned Mission to Europa RPG incorporated into the second half of the course (after spring break), and mixed method assessments will seek to understand the impact of the RPG on student learning.

Authored by
Prof. Steven McAlpine (University of Maryland Baltimore County)

Research in innovation management and entrepreneurship highlights that an individual’s network can impact entrepreneurial success. Personal networks help individuals identify entrepreneurial opportunities, find diverse ideas and relevant information, and access entrepreneurial support resources. This study examines the impact of individual and programmatic factors on network growth and corresponding impact on entrepreneurial success. The study follows the network evolution of participants in NSF I-Corps, an entrepreneurial training program for early-stage deep technology entrepreneurs. Participant ego networks were captured by having participants enter anonymized data (all people are numbers) on connections from the online platform LinkedIn. Additional data on strength of connections was also captured for each connection. Participants were also asked to identify which connections were gained through the training program. Participant networks were analyzed to determine underlying network structure. This involved the use of network structural metrics such as centralization, density, and proportions of strong ties. Analysis of network structural metrics over time was used to quantitatively represent different networking strategies. Differences in participants’ networks across different cohorts and sub-programs within the training program will be used to identify best practices for improving innovation and entrepreneurial outcomes.

Authored by
Ria Madan (Texas A&M University), Miss Hadear Ibrahim Hassan (Texas A&M University), M Cynthia Hipwell (Texas A&M University), and Dr. Astrid Layton (Texas A&M University)