2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Nexus of Entrepreneurship and Innovation: A new approach to looking at the creative contributions of engineering graduates

Presented at Entrepreneurship & Engineering Innovation Division (ENT) Technical Session 5: Exploring and Re-Examining Ideas in Engineering Entrepreneurship and Innovation Education

Engineers are called upon to possess strong analytical and communication skills, exhibit practical ingenuity, and be creative thinkers, all the while upholding high ethical standards. In more recent times they are also expected to be innovative and entrepreneurial. We see this in large companies working to incentivize their engineers to contribute to product innovation through, for example, involvement in makerspaces, hackathons, and design sprints. We see it in universities in their offering stand-alone courses on product innovation and entrepreneurship for their engineering students, integrating innovative and entrepreneurial ideas into existing technical courses, and creating a variety of extra-curricular activities to put those ideas into play. At the same time, the concepts of innovation and entrepreneurship are generally treated and explored as distinct areas of research; as such, distinct and separate measures of an individual’s self-efficacy and associated behaviors have been developed.

In this work we take a different tack, wanting to identify the nexus, or common ground, of Innovative and Entrepreneurial self-efficacies, and Innovative and Entrepreneurial behaviors. Thinking about common ground is a useful lens with which to look at the intentional or focused creativity of engineers, whether they are working in new or existing enterprises. First, we show the development of this intersectional/nexus concept (which we call Embracing New Ideas, ENI) in terms of measures of self-efficacy (ENI-SE; consisting of six items, with a Cronbach’s Alpha of .85) and behavior (ENI-B; consisting of five items, with a Cronbach’s Alpha of .80). Then based on Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), we model ENI-B (our dependent variable) as a function of ENI-SE and a variety of workplace and work-assignment features, as well as demographics. Our data for developing these new Self-Efficacy and Behavior Constructs, and creating a descriptive model comes from a sample of over 700 engineering alumni working in a variety of roles and job functions. Results from linear regression models show that over 55 percent of the variability in ENI-B is explained by a combination of self-efficacy and contextual or workplace factors. These results begin to establish a solid foundation for subsequent work that explores educational experiences that contribute to engineering students developing self-efficacy in Embracing New Ideas, and workplace settings that truly enable behaviors related to Embracing New Ideas.

Authors

Mr. Felix Kempf King's College London [biography]

Felix Kempf is a PhD Researcher at King's Business School, King's College London (United Kingdom) and an Assistant Researcher in the Designing Education Lab in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University.

Felix holds a Bachelor and
Nada Elfiki Stanford University [biography]

Nada Elfiki was a Visiting Student Researcher in the Design Education Lab in Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University from February 2020 to February 2021. Her research interests bridge innovative and entrepreneurial behavior with insights from psychology, focusing on neuroplasticty and mindset in educational development.

Nada holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Management and Technology from the Technical University of Munich, with specializations in Mechanical Engineering, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Finance. She is also an alumna scholar of the entrepreneurial qualification program at Munich’s Center for Innovation and Business Creation (UnternehmerTUM).

Professionally, Nada currently works as a Senior Corporate Strategy Manager at a SaaS company. Her student practical experiences include roles as venture capital investment analyst, startup strategy consultant and entrepreneurial coach, alongside being team lead for innovation projects in the automotive industry.
Aya Mouallem http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9360-9971 Stanford University [biography]

Aya Mouallem (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. She received a BEng in Computer and Communications Engineering from the American University of Beirut. Aya is a graduate research assistant with the Designing Education Lab at Stanford, led by Professor Sheri Sheppard, and her research explores the accessibility of introductory electrical engineering education. She is supported by the Knight-Hennessy Scholarship and the RAISE Doctoral Fellowship.
Dr. Helen L. Chen http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6415-7814 Stanford University [biography]

Helen L. Chen is a Research Scientist in the Designing Education Lab in Mechanical Engineering and co-founder of the Integrative Learning Portfolio Lab in Career Education at Stanford University. She earned her undergraduate degree from UCLA and her PhD in Communication with a minor in Psychology from Stanford. Her scholarship is focused on engineering and entrepreneurship education, portfolio pedagogy, reflective practices, non-degree credentials, and reimagining how learners represent themselves through their professional online presence.
Prof. George Toye [biography]

Ph.D., P.E., is adjunct professor in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. While engaged in teaching project based engineering design thinking and innovations at the graduate level, he also contributes to research in engineering education, effect
Dr. Micah Lande http://orcid.org/https://0000-0003-4964-5654 South Dakota School of Mines and Technology [biography]

Micah Lande, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor and E.R. Stensaas Chair for Engineering Education in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. He teaches human-centered engineering design, design thinking, and design innovation courses. Dr. Lande researches how technical and non-technical people learn and apply design thinking and making processes to their work. He is interested in the intersection of designerly epistemic identities and vocational pathways. Dr. Lande received his B.S. in Engineering (Product Design), M.A. in Education (Learning, Design and Technology) and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering (Design Education) from Stanford University.
Kei Hysi
Dr. Xiao Ge http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-3689-868X Stanford University [biography]

I am a researcher at Center for Design Research in Mechanical Engineering Department and Psychology Department, Stanford University.
Prof. Sheri D. Sheppard Stanford University [biography]

Sheri D. Sheppard, Ph.D., P.E., is professor (emerita) of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. Besides teaching both undergraduate and graduate design and education related classes at Stanford University, she conducts research on engineering education.

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