Engaging Engineering Students with Engineering Entrepreneurship and the Start-Up Working Environment through Supervised Entrepreneurial Work-Integrated Learning

Abstract

Higher-education institutions are seeing an increasing interest in entrepreneurship education across the disciplines, engineering programs included. With a parallel growing emphasis on work-integrated learning opportunities for students, a unique opportunity is presented with an Entrepreneurial Work-Integrated Learning (EWIL) pedagogy, where entrepreneurship education is delivered through the application of work-integrated learning pedagogy. Supervised Entrepreneurial Work-Integrated Learning (sEWIL) is a particular modality of EWIL, where engineering students learn about entrepreneurship through participation in a start-up working environment, where students directly observe and participate in the entrepreneurial working environment. sEWIL offers students an authentic real-world learning environment where tacit entrepreneurial knowledge is acquired, knowledge that cannot be taught through in-class traditional teaching practices. Through purposeful reflection, engineering students are confronted with the question of their professional and personal identities and their compatibility to the start-up working environment, whether as entrepreneurs or as working engineering professionals. The sEWIL pedagogy is presented and discussed through a work-integrated learning quality framework.