2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

With the intensifying demand for cultivating entrepreneurial mindsets (EM) across engineering and the broader STEM disciplines, national policy initiatives and practice-based efforts such as the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, the NSF Innovation Corps program, and the proactive programming of The Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) have sought to emphasize the entrepreneurial potential of technically trained students. KEEN’s taxonomy of curiosity, connections, and creating value has become an influential organizing framework as well as their support for curricular resources, faculty development, and funding to advance EM integration. But we should be curious about how faculty belief systems, identities and experiences about entrepreneurism shape pedagogy. This study examined engineering faculty perceptions of what it means to “be entrepreneurial,” the EM attributes they most value, and the pedagogical strategies they employ to cultivate EM among students. Drawing on effectuation theory and KEEN’s five EM habits, we employed a mixed-methods design utilizing closed- and open-ended survey items and reflective responses from a faculty learning workshop at a U.S. land-grant university. Deductive thematic analysis, guided by the five principles of effectuation (bird-in-hand, affordable loss, lemonade, crazy quilt, pilot-in-the-plane), alongside inductive coding, revealed both overlapping and divergent interpretations of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial mindset, and engineering mindset; accentuating the need for clearer conceptual perspective and integration of these terms in engineering education. Additionally, Faculty participants prioritized EM traits such as persistence, inquisitiveness, initiative, resilience, curiosity, continuous learning, adaptability, accountability, and resourcefulness. This shows that faculty placed particular emphasis on “action orientation agency,” suggesting that entrepreneurial mindsets are nurtured through experiential and iterative learning processes. Teaching strategies such as open-ended design projects, think pair share, reflective writing, peer review, concept map, presentations and team-based learning were adopted by faculty and are shown to align with experiential, student-centered, and constructivist pedagogical goals in engineering. Our findings make two primary contributions. First, they highlight how faculty perceptions, values, and identities function as both enablers and filters of EM cultivation, shaping how entrepreneurism is positioned within engineering education. Second, they suggest that EM outcomes observed in students often mirror the orientations and practices of faculty themselves, rendering faculty development a critical site for EM cultivation. The study then advocates for educators and policy makers to gravitate the teaching of entrepreneurism in more intentional and reflective ways recognizing faculty as both interpreters and co-constructors of entrepreneurial learning environments within the engineering discipline.