Instilling an entrepreneurial mindset through IDEAS studio courses

Abstract

Over the last three years, we have developed 5 elective courses called IDEAS studios to instill an entrepreneurial mindset in our students. The IDEAS studios focus on practical engagement with topics that include opportunity recognition, customer engagement, design thinking, ideation, fabrication, and scaling. In designing the IDEAS studio courses, we have recognized seven characteristics that we suspect facilitate student growth in non-cognitive attributes related to an entrepreneurial mindset. The non-cognitive attributes include curiosity, intrinsic motivation, persistence, and a growth mindset. In this paper we describe these seven characteristics, their specific implementation, and why we believe they have an influence on an entrepreneurial mindset. We conducted a pilot assessment study to determine the effect of these courses and the seven characteristics on intrinsic motivation and curiosity. We provide brief results of the study in this paper, which show that the IDEAS courses positively affect both curiosity and intrinsic motivation.