2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Integrating entrepreneurship elements into the college classroom and beyond is gaining momentum across higher education institutions in the U.S. Engineering faculty are adopting Entrepreneurial Minded Learning (EML) to help students develop entrepreneurial skills. A wide range of approaches are used including offering a minor or specialized courses, incorporating EM elements into existing courses, running student competitions that focus on ideation and value creation, providing physical spaces to support EM development, and so on. At our institution, we employ both curricular and extracurricular activities to foster EM in students including integration of EM in specific courses in all four years of students’ programs, a few competitions held throughout the academic year, a living learning community with a focus on EM, and an entrepreneurial engineering certificate. Our efforts span back more than a decade. Most of the focus during the initial years was on the program implementation with some preliminary assessments based on data collected.

Assessment of educational interventions is of particular importance because it helps to determine whether the interventions are effective. As we collected more data over time, we were able to expand our assessments. In this paper, we present findings of a longitudinal study related to our EM efforts that provides a more comprehensive evaluation. The study was performed with a cohort of undergraduate engineering and computer science students who started in fall 2017 and were exposed to all curricular EM focused learning experiences in our college and the extra-curricular ones they chose to participate induring their studies. The data was collected using a survey instrument with 50 questions loaded on 14 factors and then analyzed using statistical methods. Students completed the survey during the incoming first-year orientation in fall 2017 and then again at the end of their senior year in their capstone design courses in spring 2021. The factors associated with the entrepreneurial mindset of students were problem solving/logical thinking; engaging stakeholders; value creation; risk management; ability to learn; analyze market conditions; systems thinking; team building; prior exposure to entrepreneurship; ability to anticipate technical developments; intrinsic curiosity; ability to assess financial value; data driven decision making; and career plan. The results show that the students’ entrepreneurial mindset increased in all areas except prior exposure to entrepreneurship and career plans – both of which are explainable. While the growth observed may be attributable to elements beyond the EM focused interventions, their contribution cannot be denied. Comparison of the current results with our earlier work supports this inference.