Work in progress: Weekly innovation challenge: Changing the mindset one step at a time every week

Abstract

While the value of the entrepreneurial mindset in engineering is now well recognized, faculty members are still struggling to find curricular and extracurricular activities to instill this mindset. This paper presents weekly innovation challenges as a relatively easy to implement set of activities that can be incorporated into: i) Existing courses as impromptu competitions and icebreakers that require no major curricular overhaul ii) Extracurricular activities to effectively engage students and faculty, and iii) Outreach activities to promote STEM and entrepreneurship through summer camps, engineers week competitions, K-12 outreach, and open-house events. The goal of the weekly innovation challenges is to instill the entrepreneurial mindset and foster interdisciplinary team to address a need under tight time constraints. In the long-term, the challenges have the potential to change the eco-system of the entire school. This paper provides insights into the organization of such challenges and logistics in conducting them.