2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In recent years, the retention of undergraduate engineering majors and the subsequent career pathways of students after graduation has gained concern as studies reveal that many engineering students do not continue into engineering careers, despite a global need for them. Decreased engineering self-efficacy, lack of engineering identity, and low perceived levels of career preparedness have all been shown to play a major role in the loss of potential engineers. To promote more confidence and improve students’ success in engineering careers, many degree programs have explored the incorporation of entrepreneurial engagement and the development of students’ “entrepreneurial mindsets”. Entrepreneurship in engineering curriculum promotes the development of soft skills, business knowledge, and the ability to create innovative solutions for “real-world” applications and customers – many of the skills that students feel they lack as they work towards their degrees. In turn, students who participate in entrepreneurial activities in their engineering programs have been found more likely to pursue an engineering career post-graduation compared to students who have no entrepreneurial experience. Adaptations of a National Science Foundation (NSF) program called Innovation Corps (I-Corps) have recently emerged as a promising approach to incorporate entrepreneurship into undergraduate curriculum. I-Corps was originally designed to lead teams of graduate students and start-up leaders through customer discovery and business model validation during a seven-week bootcamp. Some studies have suggested the I-Corps model has several potential benefits within undergraduate education, but more research is needed to elucidate the features of I-Corps that are most valuable at the undergraduate level.
In this study, we developed a new Entrepreneurial Bioengineering elective course for junior and senior undergraduate engineering students that models various aspects of the I-Corps program. The course introduces entrepreneurship, business model canvas, and lean start-up principles to the students with a focus on medical device customer discovery and technology commercialization. Students work in teams to form project ideas, interview customers, test business model hypotheses, and present their discoveries. The goal of this study was to investigate which attributes of the course affect students’ perceptions of their own self-efficacy, identity, and overall confidence to succeed as an engineer in creating value for customers. To assess the outcomes of the course, we devised a survey which students took at the beginning and end of the semester. The survey consisted of open-ended and 5-point Likert scale questions focused on perceived entrepreneurial knowledge and soft-skill development. Pre- and post-semester surveys were compared for each student. We used the NVivo software to analyze open-ended responses and found that conducting customer interviews was one of the key aspects of the course which led to improved levels of student confidence. Additionally, results from the Likert scale questions confirmed that students had increased entrepreneurial knowledge and soft skills. Interestingly, the course did not seem to impact students’ future career goals, though we found evidence that students still felt more prepared for their careers since taking the course. We conclude that our undergraduate adaptation of the I-Corps program effectively promotes students’ confidence through entrepreneurial mindset development.