Student Perceptions

Focus: Creating Value 

Creating Value is a component of the entrepreneurial mindset. It is the third of the 3C’s (Curiosity, Connections, Creating Value). Explore why students must be champions of value creation.

The focus of the KEEN Rising Star Award was to learn more about student perceptions of their entrepreneurial mindset development due to their participation in curricular and co-curricular activities at Rowan University.

As part of this project, we interviewed 19 undergraduate engineering students during the fall and early part of the spring semester, asking them:

The work conducted on this project also resulted in both a peer reviewed ASEE conference publication and a peer reviewed journal publication. 

The ASEE publication focused on comparing the students’ definition of entrepreneurial mindset with that of known literature definitions (student self-report surveys, entrepreneurs, and faculty members). It also examined whether students felt that the entrepreneurial mindset was beneficial to their career and if the characteristics that students identified as important were desired by industry. The ASEE conference publication can be found here.

The peer reviewed journal publication was accepted for publication in the STEAM Entrepreneurship Education Special Issue of the Entrepreneurship, Education, and Pedagogy Journal. This journal publication focused on better identifying what types of curricular and co-curricular activities contributed to students’ entrepreneurial mindset development, and what aspects of an entrepreneurial mindset students believed were developed through each of these activities. The STEAM publication can be found here.

It is anticipated that this project will have an impact on both students at Rowan University as well as the broader engineering entrepreneurship research field. 

In terms of students, the first-year engineering entrepreneurial mindset video will be used across all sections of our first-year multidisciplinary design course at Rowan in the coming academic years. Although we continue to provide opportunities for students to build upon their entrepreneurial mindset within coursework, it has been found that students tend to appreciate hearing from their peers, so it is expected that there will be a greater appreciation for the need to develop an entrepreneurial mindset through the inclusion of this video in the course.

The recruitment video will also be beneficial to better communicate the benefits of learning about entrepreneurial mindset while pursuing engineering, and provide a level of awareness that high school students may not have previously had about this integration. 

With regard to the broader engineering entrepreneurship research field, our work has contributed to providing direct measurement of the method in which students define an entrepreneurial mindset. It was observed that there was a bit of a disconnect between how students and faculty define entrepreneurial mindset. Our paper provided suggestions on how to modify the framing of these activities in the classroom to ensure students were taking away the key points we desire them to achieve. We also learned that curricular activities and jobs/internships are key contributors to entrepreneurial mindset development and should continue to be emphasized within undergraduate engineering.

I have really appreciated the opportunity to be recognized as a KEEN Rising Star. 

The grant funds associated with the award allowed me the chance to do research on students’ development of entrepreneurial mindset that I was interested in but did not have the resources to undertake prior to this grant. It also allowed me to provide a forum for undergraduate engineering students to learn more about engineering education research and how it is applied to investigate entrepreneurial mindset development. 

The participation in this project confirmed for one of the students that she would like to pursue a PhD in Engineering with a concentration in Engineering Education. She has now started her doctoral degree under my supervision and has been an active contributor to both the KEEN Institutional grant and the KEEN Concept Map grant. 

I am thankful for being given this opportunity and look forward to building upon the work conducted this year in future entrepreneurial mindset research efforts.

This work has provided me personal value through its ability to expand my understanding of student perception of entrepreneurial mindset. 

It's easy to assume that the students' understanding of the concept matched my intentions, but it's not often that we have the chance to explore if this is really the case. Through these results, I can now modify my teaching approaches to make sure that I am making meaningful tie-ins to entrepreneurial mindset in my classes and ensure students have clarity on what it means to develop this mindset.

The project also provided training to the students on how to create value as they had to learn more about the different target audiences for their work and pivot/adjust their plans accordingly. A conference and journal paper audience is vastly different from the student populations we were hoping to reach through the videos created. 

This research project gave students the opportunity to work with both of these types of stakeholders and reflect on how their messaging needed to change to meet the needs of the identified stakeholder groups.

Rising Star nominees are selected at each institution in the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN). These local nominations recognize early-career faculty who contribute to the partner institution’s and Network’s efforts to advance the development of an entrepreneurial mindset in undergraduate engineering students. Nominations of these local Rising Stars are then reviewed by a KEEN awards committee for recognition at the national level. Three national Rising Stars are selected annually through this process.