2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Despite the growing demand for adaptable, innovation-oriented professionals, conventional STEM education often falls short in cultivating the skills and competencies required in today’s dynamic workforce. As Deveci and Seikkula-Leino (2023) note, conventional teaching models emphasize passive knowledge transmission rather than the active, applied, and reflective learning processes essential to entrepreneurial and innovation development (González et al., 2019). The BATTERI project responds to this challenge through an interdisciplinary, experiential learning program that engages undergraduate students in addressing real-world problems while cultivating innovation and entrepreneurial thinking. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the program unites a large public research university, a private historically Black university, and a two-year public institution in a 10-week clean-tech internship experience. Through faculty-guided, challenge-based projects, students work across disciplinary and institutional boundaries to develop solutions to complex, authentic problems. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of BATTERI’s experiential innovation model in supporting students’ entrepreneurial mindset development. Specifically, this research asks: How do faculty design and students experience the conditions that foster entrepreneurial learning within the program’s experiential environment?

Guided by the social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1989) and Entrepreneurial Mindset Framework (KEEN, 2016), this study conceptualizes entrepreneurial mindset development as both a learning process and a developmental outcome. The KEEN framework defines the entrepreneurial mindset through three interrelated dimensional, including curiosity, connections, and creating value, which together describe how individuals identify opportunities and generate meaningful impact. Social Cognitive Theory complements this framework by explaining how such mindsets are cultivated through reciprocal interactions among individuals, mentors, and their learning environments. Within the BATTERI program, faculty model problem-solving and adaptive expertise, while students build self-efficacy and motivation through mastery experiences, collaboration, and reflective practice.

This research employs a qualitative, multi-perspective case study approach (Creswell & Poth, 2018) to provide an in-depth understanding of entrepreneurial learning within a bounded experiential environment. The case is defined as the BATTERI program, a 10-week interdisciplinary internship training initiative. Data sources include: (1) semi-structured interviews with four mentors from different disciplines, (2) reflective journals completed by seven student participants throughout the program, and (3) individual post-program interviews with students. Faculty data capture design logics, mentoring strategies, and reflections on program impact, while student data examine meaning-making, confidence development, and responses to uncertainty. Data will be analyzed thematically (Braun & Clarke, 2022), guided by key constructs of curiosity, connection, and value creation to identify shared and divergent perspectives across participants.

This study contributes to engineering and STEM education by offering a multi-stakeholder evaluation of how experiential learning programs cultivate entrepreneurial mindsets. Findings will illuminate how faculty design practices, mentoring structures, and reflective activities shape students’ curiosity, connections, and capacity to create value. Insights from the BATTERI project will inform the design of future experiential innovation programs and highlight strategies to advance entrepreneurial learning across diverse institutional contexts.