A Nation of Entrepreneurial Engineers Will Drive Innovation

Recently, the National Science Foundation awarded a grant to our program at Stanford University to launch a national center for teaching innovation and entrepreneurship in engineering. We are deeply grateful for this opportunity to help our nation’s commitment to innovation and economic growth.

As the faculty co-director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), the entrepreneurship center at Stanford’s School of Engineering, I have the sincere pleasure of connecting our profoundly talented students with broad and vital entrepreneurial skills.

Connecting students with the best technology entrepreneurship minds and organizations is a key component of our entrepreneurship and innovation courses at Stanford. This includes a passionate commitment to experiential learning, balanced with exposure to the latest research and theory. The key here is to help bright young minds come to perceive their technical gifts as our greatest hope for creating positive economic and societal change in the world.

Another essential component to the education of 21^st century engineers is learning how to move research from the lab, to the classroom, and then into the world. With the United States seeking to maintain its innovation edge, developing more engineers and scientists who understand the value of concepts such as business models and product development is of the upmost importance.

[quote_right]”Our aim is nothing less than to fundamentally change how engineers are educated in America.”[/quote_right]Our program believes these concepts are a major key to unlocking the full potential of students to become world-changing innovators. With this grant, we hope to encourage this idea and share the wealth of dynamic entrepreneurship education insights being generated at universities across the US. Our aim is nothing less than to fundamentally change how engineers are educated in America.

Along with Stanford Professors Kathleen Eisenhardt and Sheri Sheppard, my fellow principal investigators on the project, we hope this center will catalyze changes in undergraduate U.S. engineering programs by developing an education, research and outreach hub for the creation and sharing of resources among the almost 350 U.S. engineering schools.

The center, launching operation in September 2011, will focus on three critical goals:

• Create the next wave of American innovators and entrepreneurs who will build lasting economic growth and job creation.

• Provide offerings tailored to address the distinct innovation education issues across all engineering disciplines.

• Leverage an open platform to connect students and faculty across U.S. engineering schools to share the latest tools and insights related to entrepreneurship education.

The center’s efforts to deliver the latest research and insights into classrooms will not only benefit students, but will also allow participating faculty to leverage the center’s network to disseminate research on the efficacy of entrepreneurship education. This accelerated approach will also impact the future development of the center and its processes, and we will actively engage participation by U.S. faculty and students to understand our impact. The center will develop, disseminate and deliver content across the US, and we are fortunate to be partnering with the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) in this effort.

To augment NSF funding and ground our center in real world experience, we are establishing a growing list of corporate partners, including some of the most innovative companies and venture capital firms in the United States, such as Raytheon, Microsoft, MWH Global, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), Edison International, Accel Partners, the X-Prize Foundation and Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers. These partners will provide resources for curriculum development, dissemination tools and student access to industry mentors.

While we encourage all students who have a desire to start their own companies, not everyone who takes entrepreneurship courses will end up founding a company or becoming a serial entrepreneur. However, entrepreneurship education provides broad skills that complement a technical education, empowers citizens to create their own futures in uncertain times and encourages development of the innovative problem-solving abilities necessary to solve our nation’s most daunting challenges.