An approach to teaching entrepreneurship to engineers

The School of Engineering of the University of New Mexico has conducted the Entrepreneurial Engineering Class since 1983 when the author originated it. The prime objective is to give undergraduate and graduate engineers, as well as working engineers and scientists the opportunity to learn entrepreneurial skills necessary to start and grow successful companies and to provide greater value to existing companies for which they might be employed. Using his nearly two decades of engineering management experience innovating new products, the author designed the course for students to learn skills by doing. Students work together in small groups. Each group develops a business plan for a startup that a member in that group has proposed. The paper identifies reasons for conducting such a class for engineers and the way the class has been taught. This paper also reports findings of the author's survey of a cross-section of those who took the class in the last 17 years about how they applied what they learned in the class and their recommendations for future classes.