2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Leveraging the Collective Wisdom of a Network to Identify Behaviors Linked to Entrepreneurial Mindset

Presented at ENT-2: Bridging Faculty and Student Perspectives in Entrepreneurial Education

This paper will report on the results of a four-year project to identify a set of observable behaviors associated with an entrepreneurial mindset (EM) development. Design content is commonplace in engineering, from developing requirements, to analyzing solutions, to creating models or prototypes. However, simply going forth with a design process without pursuing an exploration for opportunity and without opening an eye for impact will probably not create the best value for users and society. Accordingly, engineering programs can prepare their students for a more successful career by embracing the practical orientations associated with EM – design, opportunity, and impact. By adding opportunity and impact to their design skills, students can apply creative thinking to ambiguous problems, convey engineering solutions in terms of value, evaluate technical feasibility, and understand the motivations and perspectives of team members and stakeholders. However, mindsets of any kind are challenging to assess. We hypothesize that behaviors provide an opportunity to observe the translation of mindsets into actions and that observing these behaviors, in turn, allows for assessing EM development.

The novelty of the approach described here is that the investigators took deliberate steps to crowd-source wisdom across over 50 Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) institutions as the best means to provide the clarity and support requested by many within the Network. As part of this effort, all partner institutions within the Network were consulted through in-person visits, presentations at KEEN National Conferences, and partner surveys to craft an initial set of indicators of observable EM-specific behaviors. This set was then reviewed by experts from 38 network institutions using a three-round Delphi process (a well-established, structured approach) to identify consensus on a preliminary list of observable behaviors, which the authors finalized into a list of eight behaviors. These results not only provide a framework for researchers to develop and identify tools that measure these key observable EM-specific behaviors but also have the potential to inspire new approaches and initiatives in engineering education, thereby contributing to the transformative impact of the research.

Authors

Dr. John K. Estell http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6419-6821 Ohio Northern University [biography]

An active member of ASEE for over 30 years, Dr. John K. Estell was elected in 2016 as a Fellow of ASEE in recognition of the breadth, richness, and quality of his contributions to the betterment of engineering education. Estell currently serves as chair of ASEE's IT and Award Policy Committees; he previously served on the ASEE Board of Directors as the Vice President of Professional Interest Councils and as the Chair of Professional Interest Council III. He has held multiple ASEE leadership positions within the First-Year Programs (FPD) and Computers in Education (CoED) divisions, and with the Commission on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Estell has received multiple ASEE Annual Conference Best Paper awards from the Computers in Education, First-Year Programs, and Design in Engineering Education Divisions. He has also been recognized by ASEE as the recipient of the 2005 Merl K. Miller Award and by the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) with the 2018 ASEE Best Card Award. Estell received the First-Year Programs Division’s Distinguished Service Award in 2019 and the 2022 Computers in Education Service Award.

Estell currently serves as an ABET Commissioner and as a subcommittee chair on ABET’s Accreditation Council Training Committee. He was previously a Member-At-Large on the Computing Accreditation Commission Executive Committee and a Program Evaluator for both computer engineering and computer science. Estell is well-known for his significant contributions on streamlining student outcomes assessment processes and has been an invited presenter at the ABET Symposium on multiple occasions. He was named an ABET Fellow in 2021. Estell is also a founding member and current Vice President of The Pledge of the Computing Professional, an organization dedicated to the promotion of ethics in the computing professions.

Estell is Professor of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Ohio Northern University, where he currently teaches first-year programming, user interface design, and capstone design preparation courses. Much of his research involves design education pedagogy, including formative assessment of client-student interactions, modeling sources of engineering design constraints, and applying the entrepreneurial mindset through student engagement in educational software development. Estell earned his BS in Computer Science and Engineering degree from The University of Toledo and both his MS and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Dr. DeAnna Lynn Leitzke PE Milwaukee School of Engineering [biography]

Dr. DeAnna Leitzke serves as chair of the Civil and Architectural Engineering and Construction Management Department at Milwaukee School of Engineering.

Leitzke earned her undergraduate degree in architectural engineering from MSOE and went on to earn her M.S. in Engineering Management from MSOE. She holds a Ph.D. in Leadership for the Advancement of Learning and Service in Higher Education from Cardinal Stritch University. Prior to serving as associate vice president of academic excellence, she founded the CREATE Institute at MSOE in 2018, taught as an associate professor in MSOE’s Civil and Architectural Engineering and Construction Management Department, and was the Pieper Family Endowed Chair for Servant-Leadership. Leitzke has industrial experience as an architectural engineer with Reserve Advisors Inc. and as an architectural engineer with Affiliated Engineers.

As a lifelong resident of Milwaukee County, Leitzke is dedicated to serving the community. She is a board member of SHARP Literacy Inc., program quality committee member of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee, and committee member of the Wisconsin Servant-Leader Group. Leitzke looks forward to nurturing and growing the CAECM department’s mutually beneficial relationships with industry and community partners to provide all students with the opportunity to learn from real-world experiences that help them develop the skillset and mindset they need to solve the complex challenges of today and tomorrow.
Prof. Kurt Paterson P.E. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2441-9511 Arizona State University [biography]

Kurt Paterson enjoys re-imagining higher education with others, then making it happen.
Joshua Mitchell Milwaukee School of Engineering

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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