Entrepreneurship across the curriculum

Entrepreneurship across the Curriculum Dr. Michael Harris Provost and Vice-President for Academic Affairs Kettering University Increasingly, university students graduate into a globalized market defined by rapidly changing opportunities. This market is very different from the one dominated by large corporations seeking graduates with sound technical knowledge. Today’s innovation economy is driven not only by a technologically trained workforce, but a workforce with ready access to knowledge; the ability to synthesize this knowledge into new ideas and rapidly transfer technology from the laboratory to the product. Our graduates must be equipped not only with strong technical knowledge they must also acquire a mindset that will support them in a world where opportunities are vaguely defined and fluid. We believe that a new paradigm incorporating innovation and entrepreneurship across the curriculum is needed to prepare our students for the innovation era.

Kettering University has adopted the vision to be the national model for integrating entrepreneurship into engineering and science education by instilling a mindset of innovation and entrepreneurship in all its graduates through a transformed faculty, innovative curriculum and extracurricular activities. We believe that unless this mindset is adopted by a majority of our faculty and staff transformation of the engineering, science and business curricula to include entrepreneurship and innovation will remain a daunting challenge.

Under a grant from the Kern Family Foundation, we have developed a methodology of engagement in a sustained discussion of how entrepreneurship can provide a unified context for creating significant value for our graduates. We have entitled the approach “Entrepreneurship across the Curriculum (EAC).�

EAC workshops created a forum where groups of faculty met for eight two-hour sessions in consecutive weeks. The faculty participants were selected from all academic departments to create a healthy mix of viewpoints. Speakers were invited to share the challenges that their businesses pose to our otherwise technically sound graduates. Creation of customer value, attributes of entrepreneurial mindset, and aspects of social entrepreneurship were some of the discussion topics. EAC participants were challenged to create a way to augment their course content and expose their students to some aspect of innovation and entrepreneurship. Participants were expected to implement their proposed modification, assess its impact on the student mindset and report their findings to their colleagues.

In this workshop we will present the challenges faced, the obstacles overcome, and the lessons learned by the faculty and staff who participated in the EAC workshops. We will relate the successes generated as we have developed a framework to transform the entire university and bring by a paradigm shift to facilitate student success. We believe that over time, as more faculty and staff participate in EAC, the entire culture of Kettering will align itself with the vision of creating graduates who are well-prepared to contribute to the innovation era.