Cross-disciplinary collaboration in entrepreneurship: Engineering and business students really can work together

Abstract

This paper outlines collaboration between students and faculty in Engineering and Business with a focus on entrepreneurship. The project began in the spring, 2010 semester with an attempt to team undergraduate engineering students working on a year-long project with MBA students required to write a business plan. In 2011 the business course was changed to an undergraduate level course in business planning. Ideally the two courses would be scheduled at the same time, allowing time for in-class collaboration. The success of this model resulted in one of the projects winning the state level business plan competition. Lessons learned over the past four years are being used to develop a new course structure for both the engineering entrepreneurship and the business planning courses. Engineering and business faculty are working together to design the new curriculum, classroom space has been reserved and the courses have been scheduled to allow maximum interaction. The engineering students will continue to focus on needs identification and solution design and development. The business students will focus on market and industry analysis, financial evaluation and marketing. Class time will be divided between collaborative meeting and discipline specific instruction. Advisory boards for both colleges are fully supporting the collaborations.