2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The NSF S-STEM funded program titled Fostering Leaders in Technology Entrepreneurship (FLiTE) seeks to cultivate entrepreneurial thinking in engineering and technology students with the goal of creating graduates who bring impactful contributions to industry through the generation of creative technology ideas and new businesses.

Over its six‐year duration, this project will fund scholarships to thirty‐six unique full‐time students with financial need who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in engineering or technology. The project aims to cultivate skills in entrepreneurial thinking among undergraduates in engineering and technology by involving a cohort of students across academic years in an intensive learning community and to bring their technology‐oriented product ideas from inception to market. Scholarship recipients will be linked with campus resources, local industry partners and experts, faculty mentors, through cohort teaming sessions to propose, critique, select, develop, and implement commercially viable technology products.

The novel approach to engineering education developed through this project will serve to enrich the creative potential of new graduates in technical fields and to expand small business creation and employment, both of importance to growth regions where there may be fewer large mainstream employers. Key dimensions of those who exhibit entrepreneurial thinking will often include a growth mindset, a regular practice of creativity, and high personal self‐efficacy. With entrepreneurism seen as an enabling force to overcome employment and income divides between urban and rural job markets, dimensions of entrepreneurship that may be taught are of high interest. The project will investigate the impacts of the learning community on the learned dimensions of the entrepreneurial mindset and will examine the effects of program interventions on entrepreneurism in scholarship recipients as compared with other students in the host department.

Over the past academic year, ten scholar participants have been recruited. Weekly cohort meetings have been held to build community and teaming aspects of the cohort. Program directors have facilitated activities designed to lay a base of expectations for regular output in creative ideation among the scholars, to build self confidence in putting their individual ideas forward in shark-tank-style group discussions, and to encourage their interactions in ways that reinforce interdependence among participants. Invited speakers have presented on topics to facilitate these outcomes including idea generation using random objects, the nature of creative thinking, intellectual property protection, and success/failure narratives. Scholars have also been engaged with training from a regional startup incubator as a means introducing the cohort to the nature of startup formation and comparing their ideas with those of aspiring technology entrepreneurs.

This paper will outline activities from the inaugural year of the program including scholar recruitment and demographics, cohort meeting activities and dynamics, invited speaker topics, scholar perceptions of the program to date, and perceptions of their own growth in entrepreneurial thinking. Findings from these activities may inform the prospective structure of similar entrepreneurship programs.