Exploratory Assessment of Design Entrepreneurial Program New Venture Design Experience to Prune Program Activities

The purpose of this paper is to explore the activities of the New Venture Design Experience (NVDE), an entrepreneurial program with an engineering design and marketing focus, and recommend which activities the students report more useful. Currently the entrepreneurial program synchronizes four courses between engineering and business school over the period of two semesters. All courses are to various degrees co-taught. The campus entrepreneurial ecosystem has extracurricular activities that can supplement and or substitute some of the NVDE activities. To explore the impact of entrepreneurial activities (NVDE or ecosystem) a semi-structure interview was designed to uncover which activities were more valuable for the students after the program. For this, fourteen former students from NVDE were interviewed, seven already graduated and seven are still undergraduate students. Initial recommendations are provided towards which activities to scale down.