Promoting entrepreneurial skills through senior design projects

Abstract

Two faculty from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of North Carolina at charlotte received a grant from VentureWell to develop a course in innovation and entrepreneurship. They offered the course in the spring 2013, spring 2014 and spring 2015 semesters. This course consisted of graduate and undergraduate students from several disciplines working on multiple projects; each project was unique, formed out of student or faculty ideas. The faculty teaching this course developed a strategy to nourish the innovation and entrepreneurship in young engineer by allowing all engineering majors to register for the course and by forming multidisciplinary teams that worked on the innovation of the idea, developed an executive summary of the project and looked into the financial support of the invention. Each team had to analyze the opportunity at hand, provide a thorough market analysis, and write a report about the project (from inception to commercialization). Students on each team were encouraged to continue to work together in the College of Engineering Senior Design I and Senior Design II courses with the intent of them being able to commercialize the design. Part of the faculty effort was to build and promote a culture of innovation among engineering students; therefore as a follow up from the course offering in the spring 2013 the faculty supported two projects during their capstone senior design courses for the fall 2013-spring 2014 semesters with a strong plan for commercialization of the product. These students were motivated, self-driven and excited about their projects and the possibility of launching a business successfully by using our program, and taking advantage of the resources available to them from our University's Office of Technology Transfer. This support allowed these two teams to design and prototype the product during the fall 2013 and spring 2014 semesters. These two teams received multiple cash awards while competing in the State of North Carolina Social Entrepreneurship Conference and the Ventureprise business competition. One team built a company which is still active even after the participants graduated with their Baccalaureate degrees. Thus far the faculty have supported four entrepreneurial teams in the capstone senior design courses. While the entrepreneurship course gives a chance for our students to work with a faculty on the development of a new product, linking it to the capstone senior design course strengthens the foundation for our engineering students to embark on new opportunity when feasible. This combination helped our students identify opportunities to implement all ideas, helped individual student learn about managing business growth, and provided methods of using critical thinking. The Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship course linked with our senior design capstone courses empowers our graduates to confront challenging business cases and to seek solution from a business perspective. Our goal is to encourage our engineering students to work with business students from the inception of an entrepreneurship project until commercialization. This paper describes in detail the successes of these entrepreneurial Senior Design teams.