2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Industrial Advisory Boards (IABs) assist academic programs with the accreditation process and ensure that the curriculum maintains currency to meet the demands of the rapidly evolving workplace. In addition, IABs also provide students with employment and internship opportunities to bridge the gap between classroom materials and practical experiences. Currently, most IABs have bi-annual or annual meetings at academic institutions to provide feedback and general program assistance. However, this feedback might take a long time to be implemented due to a lack of initiative and follow-up between meetings which leads to a lack of active engagement from the IAB members. To mitigate these issues and generate action-oriented collaborative partnerships between academia and IABs, we propose a Strategic Doing (SD) workshop with the IAB members. Strategic Doing is a framework developed by the Agile Strategy Lab at Purdue University to help form collaborations quickly and move these collaborations towards actions with measurable outcomes. SD framework involves ten simple rules which result in a non-hierarchical collaboration between academia and IABs. This framework focuses on action in 30-day cycles, so the IAB members stay engaged as partners for longer periods. In this paper, we present the details of the SD workshop conducted with the IAB members of ’s Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Engineering Department and ’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. We also present the partnership projects developed as a part of these workshops at both universities. In addition, these projects were mapped to the 3 C’s (Curiosity, Connections, and Creating Value) to evaluate the potential for Entrepreneurial Mindset Learning (EML) among undergraduate students. EML is a pedagogical framework developed by Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) to promote graduates to become value creators for their organizations.

This approach of generating collaborative partnership projects between IAB members and academic institutions using SD was first done at the ’s Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Engineering Department in Spring 2022. The participants went through the SD process of 10 rules, during a 3-hour long workshop, to generate actionable assets that can be combined to pilot a pathfinder project that has a high impact and is easy to accomplish in a short time frame. Nineteen industry partners, five faculty members, and 4 staff from institutional advancement participated in the workshop to explore the question “Imagine that ’s MEIE graduates exceeded their employer's expectations of how much value they create for their employer. How might we get there?” From this workshop, four partnership projects were developed and implemented for the 2022-2023 academic year. Subsequently, this approach was implemented at ’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department during the Fall 2022 semester. The participants of the workshop included 7 IAB members, 3 faculty, and one faculty member from . The participants were divided into two tables of 6 people each and were provided an appreciative framing question, “Imagine if the CEE department had a strong partnership with local industry, what would that look like?”. These pathfinder projects will be implemented in early Spring 2023.