The University of Texas at San Antonio's Center for Innovation and Technology Entrepreneurship (CITE) began with the mission of establishing intercollegiate technology entrerpreneurship as a cornerstone of engineering and business undergraduate education. A case study of the process creating this center is presented including the elements that have allowed for the acceleration of the program and the elements that have been barriers to overcome. In three years, the CITE has established an intercollegiate $100K New Technology Venture Competition, provided training to over 300 young technology entrepreneurs, hosted 44 New Technology Venture Pitches, created over a dozen new invention disclosures, and spun off multiple new companies and technology licenses. In addition, the implementation of programs in the center has been coupled with studies of the young technology entrepreneurs themselves to inform a more robust decision-making model for Accelerating Collegiate Entrepreneurship (the ACE model).
Unlike other countries, engineers have increased their relevance and market demand in recent decades in Chilean society. Engineering programs attract and enroll the best students from high schools and engineers rank in the top salary range.This success has its origins in different historical and contextual elements.In 1986, as a result of what ended up being an anticipation of current tendencies, within the industrial engineering program a new improvement process was initiated based on the incorporation of Biology of Cognition and Radical Constructivism proposals. This process, called the Learning to Start Starting by Learning (LSSL) Program, has resulted in the design and implementation of new courses, workshops, and other learning activities, all based on relating entrepreneurship skills development with the enhancement of learning capabilities.This paper is aimed at sharing the main elements and results of this innovative program in engineering education.
This paper presents the project-based innovation and entrepreneurship education activities of the Mercer Entrepreneurship Engineering Education Program (MEEEP), developed and implemented through Kern Family Foundation grants. How the Mercer University School of Engineering (MUSE) promotes an entrepreneurial mindset among engineering students is presented in terms of curriculum development, entrepreneurship club activities, recruiting and involving students and faculty, assessment of entrepreneurship courses, and the challenges encountered in implementing/sustaining the program. The course sequence integrates elements of entrepreneurship with engineering; develops an entrepreneurial mindset in engineering students; fosters innovation and creativity in engineering disciplines; and helps students to develop business plans for entrepreneurial design projects. The expansion of this program through the recently established Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) will support educational interdisciplinary curricula and co-curricular activities directly benefiting students and provide multi- and cross-disciplinary teaching, learning, and research opportunities on innovation and entrepreneurship to faculty and students.
The Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship initiative at Penn State is engaged in several entrepreneurial ventures that integrate teaching, research and outreach to educate entrepreneurial global citizens and create sustainable value for developing communities. Engaging students in publishing the observations and results of these initiatives in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings is an explicit objective of the program. The Institutional Review Board (IRB) is responsible for overseeing all research efforts that involve human subjects. IRB approval and subsequent compliance is essential for appropriate conduct of research activities. This paper discusses the challenges faced and lessons learned while seeking approval and ensuring compliance from the IRB on five distinct projects undertaken concurrently in Kenya in the summer of 2010. Unexpected situations that arose while gathering data and how they were resolved is also discussed. This paper aims to share insights into planning and executing research components of international entrepreneurial ventures with similar programs.
Working with, designing for, and selling to communities whose average individual daily income is less than 25 cents a day presents a set of unique challenges. SociaLite is the story of a solar-powered community lighting system that started in a first-year, first-semester engineering design class and continues today in remote rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa. It is a story about design and entrepreneurship by undergraduate students within the context of anthropology, extreme engineering and limited resources--all outcomes constrained by adherence to a minimalist framework. It is a story about providing light to the extreme poor through an independent, self-sustaining venture set close to the point of end use. In conjunction with the Ministry of Energy, students and faculty at Wa Polytechnic in the Upper West Region of Ghana, engineering and training centers are being established for the sale, assembly, installation and maintenance of these lighting systems.
Trying to develop sustainable enterprises aimed at bottom of the pyramid consumers is a significant challenge, since assumptions made in the developed world do not always carry over in developing countries. This session will be focused on challenges faced, lessons learned, iterations on business model concepts, and more as students and faculty work toward the creation of sustainable enterprises in developing countries.
This panel will discuss specific failures that faculty have encountered while working in sustainability, social entrepreneurship and humanitarian engineering programs abroad. This is partly a follow-up to the NCIIA 2010 conference talk titled "Preparing Students to Travel Overseas: Experiences from MIT's D-Lab". A discussion started during the talk about how rarely, and with good reasons, people discuss their failures. This talk will help "advance the field of invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship education" by giving real world examples of failures and lessons that can be learned for future projects. We hope that, by exposing past errors, participants can move on to new ones and continue to become more effective.
Ventures in developing communities often fail because of the disconnect between the designer, the implementer and the end-user. Finding the optimum distribution of time, money and sweat equity to be shared by the communities and partnering organizations is essential to achieving sustainability. This paper discusses the "E-spot" model, which seeks to identify the right players within the venture, define their individual roles, and define what form of equity they might offer towards fulfilling the overarching objectives of the venture, while meeting their own objectives. This exploratory research effort is an attempt to develop the model, and a design space exploration tool based on the model, that enables stakeholders to allocate resources, split equities among them, successfully place technologies on the ground, and optimize opportunities to sustain their projects socially, economically and environmentally. This paper will discuss the model and simulation results for application of the model to infrastructure-based social ventures.
What's the difference between a "conventional" business and a "social" business, in terms of mission and in terms of practice? As public and not-for-profit sector individuals have gained interest over the past decade in starting companies to accomplish their goals, dissonance has mounted over what exactly differentiates a "social" venture from any other. But fewer hard distinctions exist than we might expect. In this new all-hands-on-deck approach to problem solving, hard rules are less important than general recognition of the relationship between social utility and profit, and where it comes from.
In the summer of 2010, Rochester Institute of Technology initiated a campus-wide undergraduate summer research program coordinated by the new Center for Student Innovation. Students worked with faculty mentors on projects that covered the sciences, social sciences, information sciences, engineering and more. The diverse pool of students included those from the National Technical Institute of the Deaf and the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP). At the conclusion of the program, all teams presented results at the RIT Undergraduate Research and Innovation Symposium along with peers from LSAMP programs at Syracuse, Cornell, Clarkson and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In our presentation, student representatives from three of the projects (a novel ergonomic wheelchair, educational game development tools for One Laptop Per Child computers, and a social network system that lets alternative energy consumers share their energy and carbon reductions with the public) will share their results and impressions of this program.
Changes in the economy and workforce needs have led many engineering schools to consider offering entrepreneurship education to their students. This study explored engineering student levels of interest in entrepreneurship, their perceptions of its impact on self-efficacy, and characteristics of students who participate. Survey data were collected from 343 senior-level students at three institutions with entrepreneurship programs. Less than one third of those surveyed felt that entrepreneurship was being addressed within their engineering programs and most were interested in learning more about it. Students who took one or more entrepreneurship courses had significantly higher entrepreneurial self-efficacy on a number of measures. Students with international backgrounds, parent entrepreneurs, or who were within certain engineering majors, participated at higher rates. The results of this study provide valuable baseline data that can be useful for program development and evaluation.
This paper reports on a scorecard that can be used to assess the vibrancy of entrepreneurship ecosystems in US cities. It is based on a six-month study of entrepreneurship in Portland, Oregon with in-depth benchmarks against six comparable cites and quantitative comparison to the complete list of 51 metro areas of one million or more in population. The study identifies key indicators of a healthy environment for innovation and entrepreneurship and provides policy recommendations for improving each indicator.
Indigenous knowledge revolves around ways of knowing, seeing, and thinking that are passed down orally from generation to generation, and which reflect thousands of years of experimentation and innovation in all aspects of life. Indigenous knowledge has value for the culture in which it develops and also for scientists and entrepreneurs seeking solutions to community problems. Considering indigenous knowledge is essential when conceptualizing, validating, and implementing entrepreneurial ventures in developing communities. Penn State is producing a series of ten five-minute video clips capturing compelling stories about the importance of indigenous knowledge systems in developing and implementing strategies to address global challenges and foster development. The video stories discuss how indigenous knowledge helped solve a significant problem as well as the processes used to uncover indigenous knowledge, validate it, and apply/integrate it into community development projects in various parts of the world.
At institutions of higher-education, our responsibility is to provide methods to achieve innovative and appropriately designed man-made solutions. It is paramount to the young designers and engineers of the future that we impart the methods and experiences in a setting that allows grand, but realistic, ideas to evolve. Specific environments, elements, actors, and ingredients all play a part in forecasting the next paradigm shift in new product solutions. The following case study uses three different collaborative industry projects and product categories: a material supplier, an automotive company, and a toy company. A blend of mega trends research, traditional literature reviews, behavioral research methods, and qualitative action research methods provide a basis for informed design decisions to attain appropriate innovative results in an academic setting. This paper will provide a tested methodology for forecasting and delivering conceptual design solutions to a range of problem sets.
In 2008, Northeastern's School of Technological Entrepreneurship received a grant to design and develop a multidisciplinary new product development course for technology entrepreneurship. In this session, we will review how the class was created, implemented, and received by students, faculty, administration, and industry. The transformational class expanded on traditional content by 1) developing baseline content of general product development practices that are common to all development projects, 2) developing tailored course content for specific technologies (such as biotechnology and software), and 3) initiating a funded multidisciplinary experiential project during the course, resulting in industry-quality prototypes.The course was developed and run in conjunction with the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. The combination of engineering, industrial design, and entrepreneurship has been extremely successful from a pedagogical and student project perspective. From our session, it our hope that this model can be recreated nationwide.
