A Comprehensive Model For Integrating Entrepreneurship Education And Capstone Projects While Exceeding Abet Requirements

Abstract

Abstract NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract A Comprehensive Model for Integrating Entrepreneurship Education and Capstone Projects while Exceeding ABET Requirements Abstract Imagination, creativity, innovation, invention and venture--a sequence of professional development for 21st century renaissance engineers and technical entrepreneurial business people, designed to give engineering and business students the skill sets to compete in our global economy with its ever-increasing rate of technical and financial change. A technical entrepreneurship minor started at Lehigh University in the Fall 2004 semester is now in full swing and available to all undergraduates, including all engineering and business students. The five-course program includes two final project courses, which students can take as a capstone experience. To date, several pilot teams have successfully completed the sequence, completed their undergraduate engineering requirements and used the capstone courses to develop products and undertake business planning for their start up technical ventures. In addition to the courses in the entrepreneurship minor, infrastructure is in place to support a Student Entrepreneurship Competition in which student teams can develop prototypes and their ideas into business plan proposals for several sources of possible seed funding. The infrastructure includes a mentoring entrepreneurs’ network of Lehigh alumni, an on-campus student-start-up incubator, and new early-stage follow-up funding. This paper will describe the integration of the capstone courses with the entrepreneurship minor and show examples of student start-up companies from Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, and Integrated Business and Engineering. The paper will explore how these companies started as part of the ABET-approved capstone design courses, which significantly exceed the minimum ABET requirement of a major design experience while working in a multidisciplinary team. This model is expanded to show how the plan can be applied to all engineering disciplines. Introduction, Background and Rationale Lehigh University The 1,600 acre campus of Lehigh University is located in Bethlehem, PA, 75 miles west of New York City and 50 miles north of Philadelphia. The university is private, co- educational, non-denomination and serves 4,650 undergraduates and 1,980 graduate students with ~60% percent male and 40% female. Students are enrolled in 3 undergraduate colleges: arts and science (50%), business (20%), engineering (30%) with a graduate college of education. Lehigh is considered to be in the class of “highly selective” schools with a combined SAT scores ranging from 1210 to 1350 with over 50% of the student body receiving scholarships. The student body is from over 20 states and 65 countries with the majority of students coming from Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey and New York. There are approximately 400 full-time faculty members with an 11:1 undergraduate student to faculty ratio. The University is a class R2 research

Topics & Concepts