2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Chile's entrepreneurial ecosystem thrives on policies, support networks, and university-industry collaboration. Fostering an entrepreneurial mindset in engineering students is vital for innovation and addressing challenges. From a curricular perspective, international findings indicate that strengthening capabilities such as flexible time management (polychronicity) and cognitive flexibility/adaptability contribute to the development of entrepreneurial intention and behavior, with direct implications for program design. Recent evidence also highlights the importance of integrating decision-making frameworks tailored to entrepreneurship under uncertainty—particularly effectuation—and their positive correlation with entrepreneurial intention. Effectuation is conceived as a higher-order construct comprising experimentation, affordable loss, pre-commitment with key stakeholders, and flexibility; its components—particularly experimentation—are positively associated with entrepreneurial intention, with prior evidence reporting comparable associations among students with higher openness and extraversion. The literature supports the role of cognitive flexibility and adaptability in addressing complex, high-uncertainty contexts, fostering the generation of novel solutions and more efficient decision-making, while also relating to temporal preferences such as polychronicity, which is the inclination to alternate and coordinate multiple tasks —a frequent feature of entrepreneurial practice. This study aims to characterize the cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral dimensions associated with entrepreneurship among third-year engineering students across multiple programs, a stage at which they complete the final course in the institution’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship track. Using validated instruments, we assessed seven constructs: cognitive flexibility, cognitive adaptability, polychronicity, entrepreneurial intention, openness to experience, extraversion, and experimentation. Preliminary results indicate that components associated with effectuation (experimentation and flexibility) show the strongest associations with entrepreneurial intention, whereas personality-related dimensions (openness and extraversion) display positive but smaller correlations. In summary, this descriptive-correlational study provides actionable insights for curricular improvement, recommending the prioritization of learning experiences that strengthen cognitive adaptability, flexible time management, and effective decision-making. These results would guide instructional decisions aimed at tailoring training for entrepreneurship in uncertain environments, improving knowledge transfer to the ecosystem, and informing efforts to support technology-based ventures. In doing so, they would provide an empirical foundation to inform efforts to align university education with the entrepreneurial mindset demanded by technological development in Chile and across the region. In addition, this work is expected to serve as a baseline for subsequent studies (e.g., comparisons with Chilean founders and multivariate models) that contribute to sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems within higher education.