Teaching the Entrepreneurial Mindset to Engineers


Book Description

This book provides engineering faculty members and instructors with a base understanding of why the entrepreneurial mindset is important to engineering students and how it can be taught. It helps advance entrepreneurship education for all engineering students, and equips educators with tools and strategies that allow them to teach the entrepreneurial mindset. Divided into four parts, this book explores what the entrepreneurial mindset is, and why it is important; shows how to get started and integrate the mindset into existing coursework so that curricula can focus on both technical/functional concepts and entrepreneurial ones as well; guides readers through the growing multitude of conferences, journals, networks, and online resources that are available; and provides solid examples to get the reader started. This book is an important resource for engineering educators as they learn how to remain competitive and cutting-edge in a field as fast-moving and dynamic as engineering.




Teaching the Entrepreneurial Mindset Across the University


Book Description

“It stretches no point to suggest that creativity, innovation and risk-taking will decide our future societal prosperity. We cannot spread those values too widely, so having taught engineering faculty in their first book, these authors now aim to boost the spirit across all disciplines. What a great success for all of us if they succeed.” – Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr., president of Purdue University and former governor of Indiana Despite the relevancy of the entrepreneurial mindset for all career paths, only a small percentage of the higher education student population takes part in entrepreneurially-minded learning opportunities. This gap can be attributed to several factors. From a program perspective, many degrees are already at credit capacity which allows limited room in the existing curriculum to add new courses. From a student perspective, entrepreneurship education is thus positioned as optional and requires extra time (and in some cases tuition) to do so. Finally, from an educator perspective, the majority of faculty members across the university have not been trained in entrepreneurship and may not know where to start. Teaching the Entrepreneurial Mindset Across the University: An Integrative Approach overcomes these challenges by providing higher education faculty with a toolkit, including tips and strategies, to integrate the entrepreneurial mindset into existing courses regardless of discipline. The book is broken into three core parts: Motivation: The importance of the entrepreneurial mindset for all students is established; Design: The Entrepreneurial Mindset Teaching Blueprint is introduced as a tool for integrating entrepreneurially-minded curricular learning experiences within existing courses; Application: Example entrepreneurially-minded curriculum from across the university are provided. By integrating the entrepreneurial mindset across the curriculum, students from all disciplinary backgrounds will be better prepared to enter the workforce, solve complex social issues, and leverage entrepreneurial thinking in their everyday lives. This book is meant for educators who want to make an impact and truly prepare graduates for the real world.




Integrating Innovation


Book Description

South Australia is a small economy that faces a fundamental need to re-shape its approach to innovation. The manufacturing sector, as the backbone of the state’s economy, has and will continue to change in its nature and form. This necessitates a re-think about how innovation happens and how the respective actors within an economy interact and engage with each other. In effect, innovation relies on intersections between people, knowledge, information sharing, ideas, financial and other resources. Innovation happens through regional social and economic system dynamics; innovation relies on a system view of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship can be taken as a study of the entrepreneur and new business creation. However, this conception of entrepreneurship misses the critical link to economic outcomes; the ebb and flow of social and economic fortunes that are underpinned by the actions, reactions and engagement of individuals in a specific social and economic system that brings about innovation and change. In this book the authors are exploring how the linkages within the system can be conceptualised and made transparent.




Innovating


Book Description

Discover the MIT-developed, “doer’s approach” to innovation with this guide that reveals you don’t need an earth-shattering idea to create a standout product, service, or business—just a hunch that you can scale up to impact. Innovation is the subject of countless books and courses, but there’s very little out there about how you actually innovate. Innovation and entrepreneurship are not one and the same, although aspiring innovators often think of them that way. They are told to get an idea and a team and to build a show-and-tell for potential investors. In Innovating, Luis Perez-Breva describes another approach—a doer’s approach developed over a decade at MIT and internationally in workshops, classes, and companies. He shows that innovating doesn’t require an earth-shattering idea; all it takes is a hunch. Anyone can do it. By prototyping a problem and learning by being wrong, innovating can be scaled up to make an impact. As Perez-Breva demonstrates, “nothing is new” at the outset of what we only later celebrate as innovation. In Innovating, the process—illustrated by unique and dynamic artwork—is shown to be empirical, experimental, nonlinear, and incremental. You give your hunch the structure of a problem. Anything can be a part. Your innovating accrues other people’s knowledge and skills. Perez-Breva describes how to create a kit for innovating, and outlines questions that will help you think in new ways. Finally, he shows how to systematize what you’ve learned: to advocate, communicate, scale up, manage innovating continuously, and document—“you need a notebook to converse with yourself,” he advises. Everyone interested in innovating also needs to read this book.




Engineering Entrepreneurship from Idea to Business Plan


Book Description

This book shows engineers and scientists how to create new products that are income-producing for themselves and for investors.




Teaching Entrepreneurship


Book Description

Teaching Entrepreneurship advocates teaching entrepreneurship using a portfolio of practices, including play, empathy, creation, experimentation, and reflection. Together these practices help students develop the competency to think and act entrepreneu




Why Startups Fail


Book Description

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.




Revisiting the Entrepreneurial Mind


Book Description

The book explores various aspects of cognitive and motivational psychology as they impact entrepreneurial behavior. Building upon the 2009 volume, Understanding the Entrepreneurial Mind, the editors and contributors explore the cognitions, motivations, passions, intentions, perceptions, and emotions associated with entrepreneurial behaviors, in each case preserving their original chapters and enhancing them with thoughtful and targeted updates, reflecting on the most recent developments in theory and practice, telling the story of what has transpired in the last decade in the field of entrepreneurial psychology. The volume addresses such questions as: Why do some people start business and others do not? Is entrepreneurship a natural quality or can it be taught? Do entrepreneurs think differently from others? While there is a great deal of literature exploring the dynamics of new firm creation, policies to promote innovation and technology transfer, and the psychology of creativity; research on entrepreneurial mindset or cognition is relatively new, and draws largely from such related fields as organizational behavior, cognitive and social psychology, career development, and consumer research. In this book, editors Brännback and Carsrud have reassembled the contributors to Understanding the Entrepreneurial Mind to discuss new research paradigms given their vantage point years after the original volume was published. Featuring the most current literature references, Revisiting the Entrepreneurial Mind continues to challenge conventional approaches to entrepreneurship and articulate an agenda for future research.




Venture Girls


Book Description

From an engineer and entrepreneur, a conversation-changing parenting book about how to engage young women in science, technology, engineering, and math, filled with practical advice for both parents and educators.As the female CEO of a tech startup, Dr. Cristal Glangchai was outnumbered twenty to one. At Google, Twitter, and Facebook, women currently fill just ten to twenty percent of technical jobs. While career opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and math have increased dramatically in the past twenty years, the achievement gap between men and women has only grown wider. In VentureGirls, Glangchai offers a unique solution based on her own experience as an engineer and entrepreneur as well as the founder of the VentureLab, an academy of entrepreneurship and technology for girls. Practical, accessible, and filled with success stories, VentureGirls argues that a key part of raising strong, confident young women is giving them the tools of entrepreneurship to engage in STEM. Entrepreneurship isn’t just about starting companies, Glangchai writes, it is a skillset and a way of thinking that is particularly useful in the fields of science, mathematics, engineering, and technology. Entrepreneurship involves identifying needs, brainstorming creative solutions, innovating, and taking calculated risks. In short, it’s about having a vision and making it a reality. The true value in learning and practicing entrepreneurship, Glangchai argues, lies in nurturing and growing an overall mindset—the ability to learn from failure and to work well with others to bring your ideas to life. Deeply informative, warm, and grounded in real-world experience, VentureGirls includes a plethora of activities and lessons that focus on strengthening kids’ ingenuity and resilience. VentureGirls is essential reading for anyone who wants to raise girls and young women who realize their strength, engage in the world, and feel empowered to make a positive impact.




Nurturing Science-based Ventures


Book Description

This book includes over 30 real-life, up-to-date, award-winning case studies in scientific fields such as biotechnology, biomedicine, high-tech engineering and information technology. The case studies are arranged in modules that track the typical life cycle of creating and growing a new venture, which presents a comprehensive picture of entrepreneurial activities. The text is written in a language and style that managers will appreciate.