Educating all engineering students to become entrepreneurial

Project introduction and background information

This PhD project emerged from 4TU.CEE's ambition to educate future engineers with an entrepreneurial mindset enabling them to deal with grand societal challenges as recognized by the United Nations in the Agenda 2030 and specified towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

These grand societal challenges require that we educate T-shaped engineering students who develop skills not only focused on technical expertise but also on developing an entrepreneurial mindset allowing them to shape solutions with different actors (e.g. peers, teachers, stakeholders) in an iterative process of multiple value-creation that is spiced by uncertainties. The value that is being created to address the SDGs should be sustainable per definition and can be economic, social, environmental, cultural or a combination of these.

To embed the development of an entrepreneurial mindset in engineering degrees, technical universities require evidence-based education interventions on entrepreneurial engineering for sustainability. These need to be designed from a wide entrepreneurship approach, which is focused on learning through entrepreneurship – providing entrepreneurial skills and attitudes in the context of multiple value creation.

Threfore, the main purpose of this PhD project is to develop evidence-based materials for education facilitating the student in developing towards the entrepreneurial engineer for societal impact.

Different steps have been outlined to reach this goal. First, based on the literature and through a Delphi study among faculty and practitioners, the profile of the entrepreneurial engineer will be created. Next, the effects of existing (wide) entrepreneurship education interventions for engineers will be tested and best practices, gaps an needs will be detected. Finally, new interventions to foster the entrepreneurial engineer will be developed, tested, and monitored.