Entrepreneurial Engineering Pedagogy: Models, Tradeoffs and Discourses

Journal article, 2020

While entrepreneurship discourse is gaining traction in engineering and
the number of entrepreneurship courses increase rapidly, there is a lack
of study focusing on how and why engineering educators facilitate
entrepreneurial experiences in their courses. Using a qualitative and
inductive case-study approach, this paper explores and explicates
pedagogical models for facilitating entrepreneurial experiences in
engineering, and their underlying design principles. Investigating seven
entrepreneurial project-based courses, three distinct pedagogical models
for facilitating entrepreneurial experiences are identified. Two potentially
conflicting dimensions are highlighted and argued as vital for educators
to consider when implementing entrepreneurial experiences into their
courses. These dimensions are: to make learning more personal, and
to make learning more professional. The paper discusses how
entrepreneurial engineering pedagogy is anchored in entrepreneurship
education and engineering education discourse, and suggests means
through which the two disparate streams of research can be integrated
in order to further research on entrepreneurial engineering pedagogy.