2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work in progress describes how a bioengineering program has reached beyond faculty in engineering and related sciences to incorporate expertise and coursework from a broader set of disciplines with a direct impact student success. Those interdisciplinary networks – particularly from business, communication, and the university library – enhance innovation and entrepreneurship education in graduate engineering programs.
We present this from the perspective of a key representative of one of the non-engineering partner institutions, with a hope to provide insight for engineering program decisionmakers. The program described here is delivered through a series of courses, trainings, coaching, and experiential learning opportunities conducted through the bioengineering program’s facilities and directed by its faculty and administrators, but it relies on networks and programs developed and cultivated elsewhere in the university. In addition, those programmatic needs from bioengineering have helped shape course offerings in other parts of the university as students have sought outside expertise in developing broader expertise and insight into innovations based on basic and applied research.
Based on principles of and shared interest in effective design and best practices in communication, the program we describe reframes graduate student education from the first week that students arrive on campus. The program builds on an immersive boot camp, our Impact Week, and then leads into a term-long course in science communication and design thinking. In the next term students have the option of taking a business course in innovation and entrepreneurship led by a senior faculty member in the business school. In their third term, students are required to take a basic scientific writing course that is team taught by a senior faculty member from the journalism school. In subsequent terms they then focus on grant writing and have the option to go deeper in business school curriculum with an area of concentration focused on innovation and entrepreneurship.
As we have laid the groundwork of a formal course of study for bioengineering students in innovation and entrepreneurship, we find that students also engage faculty partners regularly for non-curricular-based opportunities, particularly around innovation, communication to underserved communities, and specific funding opportunities.