Entrepreneurial engineering pedagogy: models, tradeoffs and discourses

Abstract

While entrepreneurship discourse is gaining traction in engineering and the number of entrepreneurship courses increase rapidly, there is a lack of study focusing on how and why engineering educators facilitate entrepreneurial experiences in their courses. Using a qualitative and inductive case-study approach, this paper explores and explicates pedagogical models for facilitating entrepreneurial experiences in engineering, and their underlying design principles. Investigating seven entrepreneurial project-based courses, three distinct pedagogical models for facilitating entrepreneurial experiences are identified. Two potentially conflicting dimensions are highlighted and argued as vital for educators to consider when implementing entrepreneurial experiences into their courses. These dimensions are: to make learning more personal, and to make learning more professional. The paper discusses how entrepreneurial engineering pedagogy is anchored in entrepreneurship education and engineering education discourse, and suggests means through which the two disparate streams of research can be integrated in order to further research on entrepreneurial engineering pedagogy.