The Helping Hands Dense Network a collaboration across multiple universities

Abstract

Inspired by the Kern Entrepreneurship Education Network's (KEEN) mission of educating a new type of entrepreneurially minded engineer who will "catalyze a transformation in the workforce and build economic and technical commerce in their communities,"1 four member universities of the KEEN joined together to form the Helping Hands Dense Network (HHDN) with a three-year plan of work that: Leverages industry ties to develop a deep understanding of intrapreneurship and develop collaborative intrapreneurship end-to-end education (IE3) curricula that will enrich the student learning experience Employs intercollegiate student projects (ISP) that are impactful and multi-disciplinary, with diverse student teams as a central element of an exciting new intrapreneurial culture The IE3 curriculum development will be led by two of the institutions (Baylor University and University of Detroit Mercy) and will consist of: An in-depth study of intrapreneurship Development of three modules on innovation in a corporate context Creation and presentation of a seminar series, and An intrapreneurship-focused opportunity evaluation and venture planning course/workshop called Corporate Intrapreneurship Training (CIT). The ISP features the development, piloting, and assessment of three types of student project structures and will be led by the other two HHDN institutions (University of Dayton and Villanova University): Identical projects run in parallel at each participating school Projects where the team members themselves are distributed Projects that distribute tasks among teams at each school Together, these objectives cover most of the experience of turning an unrecognized market need into a product within an established company. In particular, they impart in the students the skills associated with need identification, ideation, conceptual design and refinement, and business analysis as well as detailed design and development. Additionally, this work will develop in the students a wide range of soft skills and professional attributes associated with entrepreneurial engineering and measured using the KEEN-TTI Performance DNA2. Just as important, the proposed work will provide the students with a sophisticated understanding of the various corporate cultures as they relate to innovation and intrapreneurship. This paper will document the design and development of the HHDN, as well as the early implementation of the dense network. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.