From the Editor
Editor, AEE
Senior Associate Dean University of Pittsburgh
shuman@pitt.edu
This issue focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship. It contains a guest editorial from Phil Weilerstein (CEO of VentureWell) and Tom Byers (Professor and Director of the Stanford Technology Venture Program), two individuals, who through their involvement with the NSF funded Pathways to Innovation Program, are due much of the credit for the engineering education community’s recent interest in innovation and entrepreneurship. Their editorial provides important background relative to that current interest including the organizations behind it. The main body of this issue consists of eight peer-reviewed articles that present the current state-of-the-art of entrepreneurship education within engineering programs. Taken together they provide faculty and administrators interested in introducing or expanding innovation and entrepreneurship programs with the background literature, models, and assessments needed to be successful. Also included are two articles on Social Entrepreneurship – an important, and also expanding part of the field that is especially attractive to underrepresented minority and women students.
As described in the paper by Mary Besterfield-Sacre, Sarah Zappe, Angela Shartrand and Kristen Hochstedt, interest in innovation and entrepreneurship among engineering faculty is a very recent phenomena. They cite ASEE’s important study (led by Jack Lohman and Leah Jamison) Innovation with Impact: Creating a Culture for Scholarly and Systematic Innovation in Engineering (2012) that found from a survey of faculty from 110 different departments across 72 engineering schools that incorporating entrepreneurship into the engineering undergraduate curriculum was generally not valued. Specifically, at the undergraduate level, 52% of respondents indicated that entrepreneurship was “not important to an engineering curriculum.” At the graduate level the percentage was even higher.
Besterfield-Sacre and her colleagues go on to report….
Table of Contents
- Guest Editorial: Entrepreneurship and Innovation in
Engineering Education
Phil Weilerstein, Tom Byers - Evaluation Of Current Assessment Methods In
Engineering Entrepreneurship Education
Senay Purzer, Nicholas Fila, Kavin Nataraja - The Role of Entrepreneurship Program Models and Experiential Activities on Engineering Student Outcomes
Nathalie Duval-Couetil, Angela Shartrand, Teri Reed - Faculty and Student Perceptions of the Content of Entrepreneurship Courses in Engineering Education
Mary Besterfield-Sacre, Sarah Zappe, Angela Shartrand, Kirsten Hochstedt - NEWPATH: An Innovative Program to Nurture IT Entrepreneurs
Neelam Soundarajan, Stephen M. Camp, David Lee, Rajiv Ramnath, Bruce W. Weide - Entrepreneurial Thinking in Interdisciplinary Student Teams
Xaver Neumeyer, Ann McKenna - What Alumni Value from New Product Development Education: A Longitudinal Study
Corie L. Cobb, Jonathan Hey, Alice M. Agogino, Sara L. Beckman, Sohyeong Kim - An Educational and Entrepreneurial Ecosystem to Actualize Technology-Based Social Ventures
Khanjan Mehta, Sarah Zappe, Mary Lynn Brannon, Yu Zhao - Motivations of Women Participating in a Technology-Based Social Entrepreneurship Program
Rachel Dzombak, Sally Mouakkad, Khanjan Mehta