Instilling an entrepreneurial mindset in undergraduate engineers is essential if we want our bright young talent to innovate and then productize those innovations to better mankind. Tuition at top engineering schools is close to $200,000. For that, we, the American people get the best minds and the best ideas. But not all ideas from engineering students make it into the real world. In fact, most ideas never make it past the class deadline. Prototypes, solutions, disruptions sit on the shelf because they were designed for an engineering class not as a potential business venture. How to solve that is to integrate entrepreneurship into the fabric of the engineering program.
But not all engineering programs include entrepreneurship at all, let alone as a core competence. Entrepreneurship seems well integrated in a handful of schools: Johns Hopkins, University of Michigan, and Stanford, which has recently opened Epicenter, a National Science Foundation-funded initiative to “create a nation of entrepreneurial engineers.” But for most engineering schools, entrepreneurship is an afterthought, something taught out of the business school where engineers, those who dare, brave the walk across campus to a class that might change their lives – or our lives.
To read the original article: Epicenter: Story - Teaching Entrepreneurship in Engineering
