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 21 st 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.