INNOVATING ENGINEERING STUDENT CURRICULUM WITH ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Abstract

Innovating Engineering Students’ Curriculum with Entrepreneurship introduces the framework of entrepreneurially minded learning (EML) centred on observations, curiosity, connections, and creating value. Exploration of each of these components, instil a variety of different active learning techniques that can be applied to encourage engineering students towards entrepreneurship. Key components for making a strong learning experience for the students including learning objectives, problem statements/opportunity recognition, and teamwork are applied so as to foster the principles learned to create value and share a teaching technique for particular topics in their discipline. This paper presents a model towards producing entrepreneurial engineers. The identification of opportunities for entrepreneurship, integration into existing courses and implementing continual improvement of particular entrepreneurship practices (i.e., mechanisms, procedures, tools, frameworks) are presented for adoption to promote entrepreneurship to engineering students. As such a case study methodology is adopted for this study with summaries and case analysis of four cases of entrepreneurial learning in the premier Technical University in West Africa (Alpha) in order to unravel the relationship between technical skills, theoretical knowledge and opportunities recognition and exploitation skills. Their relative advantages and disadvantages are discussed based on the interviews with students of Alpha undergoing different phases of entrepreneurial training. The analyzed cases help to identify various positions in the integration stage and mind-set transformation era of the engineering students. This paper concludes with some propositions and a robust model for implementation towards producing entrepreneurial engineers.