2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper will describe a project for an entrepreneurial mindset class for junior engineering students. The purpose of the project was to give students an introduction to entrepreneurship, but without the risk of actually starting a new business. The course consisted of two class sections which were broken into a total of seven teams with five to six students on a team.

Each team recommended a product that could be sold by both sections. Their proposal had to include the design of the product, where it could be obtained, and how much it would cost to purchase. While teams had the option to make their product, such as with 3D printers, all teams recommended purchasing commercially available customized products. The teams produced a sixty-second video and a handout on their recommended product, to try to convince their colleagues to select their product for the class to sell. Students individually ranked the product proposals (except for their own team’s proposal), which led to selecting a leather-wrapped tumbler. Teams then had the opportunity to suggest changes to the winning proposal and to determine how many tumblers they planned to sell, which was on average over 50 cups per team or approximately 10 cups per student.

One of the unexpected challenges was that the school’s logos could only be put on products from approved vendors, who were not known until after the products were proposed. The winning team selected an unapproved vendor and only one of the many approved vendors had a comparable product, but at a significantly higher cost. The students decided to go with the originally-proposed vendor, but recommended a different logo, which was a wireframe image of the head of the school’s mascot. Since that was not an official school logo, it could be used on a product from a vendor that was not approved to make products with the school’s logos.

Each team then developed a marketing plan that included their target audience, the competition, the product selling price, any discounts they would offer, and how they would market the product. The only restriction was that the product could not be sold for less than its cost. There was a significant cost discount on the tumblers because of the large quantity purchased. Selecting a single product for all students to sell had some advantages, such as simplifying ordering and getting a substantial quantity discount. It also had some disadvantages, such as teams competing against each other for similar target audiences and the same product having different selling prices. The latter sometimes occurs in industry when distributors sell a company’s product and determine their own selling price, although there is usually not an overlap in geographic territories, like there was in this class.

This paper will report on the details of the project, including the successes and challenges. It will also include descriptions of the assignments, the results, lessons learned, what was done with the profit, student feedback, and recommendations.