Open: NCIIA 14th Annual Conference

Since 2006, two state universities and one private university in Michigan have been working together to educate students to become more entrepreneurial through curricular and extra-curricular activities. By leveraging strengths of the collaborating universities, University Collaboration in Entrepreneurship Education (UCEE) brings the best resources to its collective 65,000 students. UCEE collaborators share a common core curriculum and an inter-institutional simulated business development activity. A communications network, internships, seminars, business coaching, student entrepreneurship club events, and business plan competitions are promoted across mid-Michigan to students at partner institutions. Faculties collaborate on course development and teaching, and share resources to develop expertise and build capacity. UCEE demonstrates how a consortium of universities with the same objective can maximize their efforts for the benefit of their combined student bodies.

Students from a variety of majors at North Dakota State University have opportunities to select elective courses that focus on entrepreneurial skills and competencies. One of these is a multi-level, multidisciplinary, multi-year course known as the Bison Microventure. It is a one-credit elective course in applications of micro-technologies to product and process development for medical and dental uses. The course is open to sophomores through graduate students and is repeatable for credit. The team is co-mentored by a manufacturing engineering professor and a biochemistry research laboratory director. This session will review the learning methods, accomplishments and challenges of the innovation team during its first five semesters of operation. It will conclude with some observations of the contributions that innovation teams can make to mainstream engineering and science education.

This session reports on the successes and failures experienced during the implementation of a graduate-level Certificate in Technology Entrepreneurship program. The two-year program on commercializing technology was launched in 2008 and is jointly delivered by the University of Portland (UP) and Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). The innovative courses developed for the program have been approved by the OHSU School of Medicine Graduate Council and UP. Only five students are accepted to join the program each year from each institution. One of the stated program objectives is to start new companies or secure technology licensing deals. Attendees of this session will learn about the design of this novel program and hear directly from one or more students in the program about their experiences.

The 2007 inaugural address of RIT's ninth president, William Destler, highlighted the breadth and diversity of curricular offerings at RIT from business, engineering, and computing to design, fine art, and craft. In his address, Dr. Destler included this challenge: "What if RIT students had the experience of working on complex societal problems with students from different majors on teams in...a cross-disciplinary effort to find real solutions?" The authors of this paper took that challenge to heart. In the 2008-09 academic year, we created a collaboration curriculum that was hosted by the RIT Honors program. The outcome of the program is an integrated "innovation suite" comprised of the following components: 1. innovation activities, 2. collaborative learning environments 3. collaborative technologies 4. learning outcomes and curricular models for innovation and 5. community-university partnerships. This integrated suite of innovation components will continue to grow in the new Center for Student Innovation at RIT.

Four Michigan public universities, collaborating with private sector for-profit companies and state government agencies supporting technology commercialization and innovation, have successfully implemented methods for building and sustaining entrepreneurship, technology development and commercialization at emerging research institutions: distributing the cost, promoting best practices and affecting the cultural changes within institutions necessary for sustaining these activities. This program, led by Michigan Technological University has produced a model, termed U-TEAMED (Multi-University Technological and Expertise Assets Management for Enterprise Development). The emergent model offers guidance for identifying and capturing the important features of sustainable, faculty-led early-stage technology innovation and entrepreneurship education programs at emerging research institutions. Lessons include methods for securing revenue, sustaining faculty enthusiasm, anticipating IP and commercialization barriers derived from faculty-student collaborations, and creating an academic environment supportive of embedding technology innovation and entrepreneurship in academic curricula.

The nearly exponential growth of the entrepreneurial community at University of Michigan (U-M) is largely attributed to the students themselves. In January 2008, U-M launched the Center for Entrepreneurship to support these students. Through these and other similar efforts, students of like mind on a campus of nearly 40,000, can network, share ideas and pursue their passions. By January 2009, seven students actively involved in their own ventures joined together to find ways to share resources and ideas to accelerate the launch of their ventures.This resulted in the launch of a student run business accelerator, TechArb (techarb.org), in the Summer of 2009. The seven founders secured real estate in downtown Ann Arbor and invited 30 entrepreneurial-minded students, representing seven companies in the music, technology, and biotech industries. This paper discusses the genesis and results of the first U-M student accelerator.

Our student program to conceive, prototype, and potentially launch products--particularly in the medical technology arena--spans a wide range of age groups and subject areas. Student levels range from middle school to graduate school (including medical school) and cover disciplines as varied as physics, history, and business. Part of the glue holding the program together is an adaptable curriculum to teach both the technical aspects of prototyping and the wider range of issues (needs assessment, market analysis, etc.) associated with product development. The goal is to create a unified community of purpose and mutual instruction, where students at different levels feel that they make an important contribution both to a product itself and to the knowledge shared by members of the project. Major challenges to this approach include maintaining continuity and focus, but these challenges are offset by large benefits in learning and creativity.

Success in business requires innovation. Today's model calls for a more intuitive integration of creativity throughout the decision making process: the application of design thinking to business. There is a great opportunity for design to improve one's ability to increase a firm's value offerings. While goods are traditionally embedded with value, there is currently a paradigm shift occurring in marketing and goods are being viewed as operant resources that produce effects for customers. Thus, the good really becomes a service provider. While design is still critically important in product development, it is becoming more important in how marketers design strategy successfully. This presentation will look at how to integrate design thinking into the business model, debating the pros and cons of design thinking integration, and the importance of teaching innovative thinking in academia.

Looking back at the history of science and technology over the last few hundred years, we can identify people such as Thomas Edison, James Watt and Graham Bell as innovators, due to the outward result of their endeavors. However, it is harder to recognize Isaac Newton as an innovator, even though he was able to develop the concept of calculus, almost overnight, to overcome the hurdles to the mathematical problems he was trying to solve. Fast forward to the 21st century. What makes an innovator? How do we cultivate innovation? Do we teach them? Train them? In this session, the author will share his experience of the last twenty years in Singapore, where he started promoting innovation as a binder that can hold concept with reality, art with design, form with function, abstract with concrete, fuzzy with focus and idea with business.

Union College is a Liberal Arts school with a nationally recognized engineering program. Students at Union College are encouraged to reach beyond traditional disciplines in order to insure they have the breath of education necessary to succeed in the competitive global economy. The Engineering-Liberal Arts Entrepreneurship Seminar is part of an ongoing program at Union College to support innovation and entrepreneurship. The course, taught by an economics professor and a mechanical engineering professor, is supported by business school faculty, venture capitalists, legal experts, economic development experts, and entrepreneurs in the region that come to class to share their expertise and experience with the student teams. The teams are composed of an engineering senior and his or her senior project, along with two-to-three students majoring in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The course is about interdisciplinary communication, teamwork, social responsibility, entrepreneurship and commercialization.

Engineering is a meticulous and methodical neat freak; entrepreneurship is a disheveled compulsive gambler. Engineering lived happily in a crowded but fastidiously kept curriculum; that all changed when Entrepreneurship moved in and started unpacking. This is the story of how the two have gotten along and how they're able to share the same space. This paper gives a map of a prototypical mechanical engineering curriculum and overlays it with various entrepreneurial engineering educational elements. The paper includes a basic review of some of the various tools and techniques used to weave in entrepreneurial engineering elements, including one such technique developed at the University of Detroit Mercy: the technical entrepreneurship video-rich case study.

This session will explain and explore the four-step Skandalaris Philosophy to Developing Entrepreneurs, which is being implemented across the seven Schools and Colleges at Washington University in St. Louis. This new approach to entrepreneurship pedagogy includes multi-level, multidisciplinary courses which, as a whole, increase students' self-efficacy and confidence in their skills to pursue entrepreneurship. There are forty-five courses at the university that fall into one of the four steps to the Approach:
Perspectives Courses
Skills Courses
Simulated Experience Courses
Action/Outcome Courses
Entrepreneurship is found at all levels and in all disciplines at the university. For this reason, the Center is independent of all Schools and Colleges and reports directly to the Chancellor to remain pure to its cross-campus mission and maintain transparency. There are no prerequisites to enrollment in the courses, which promotes peer learning and collaboration among all students, thereby increasing creativity and innovation.