Daniel Michael Ferguson

Work in progress — Enhancing the entrepreneurial mindset of freshman engineers

Our research reports on an ongoing study of the impact of entrepreneurial interventions within first-year engineering courses on changes in the mindsets of engineering students. Entrepreneurial mindset in our study is operationally defined as a more growth oriented mindset versus a fixed oriented mindset. This operational definition and an accompanying mindset measurement instrument was developed and validated by Carol Dweck of Stanford University. Based on Dwecks research results we assume a growth mindset is a reasonable surrogate for a student engineers creative and innovative or entrepreneurial skills. Mindsets of student engineers are benchmarked at the beginning of the freshman year and again at the end of the freshman year, soon after completion of a team based poverty alleviation freshman capstone project. Pre- and post- control samples of freshman engineer mindsets are being collected from similar sized engineering programs at comparable colleges in our geographic vicinity. A pilot study indicated a statistically significant tilt toward a fixed mindset in freshman engineering students compared to a growth mindset observed in an opportunity sample of freshman business students. We are currently tracking engineering students both at the group and at the individual level. Our long-term research goal is to determine how and why engineering course assignments affect a student engineers entrepreneurial skill set. We hypothesize that a student engineers creative and innovation skills are in part a learned behavior that is influenced by the student engineers learning experiences and course assignments. In order to study this phenomenon we are establishing a baseline of the change in engineering student mindset over time. Once we have established this baseline of mindset data, we will then alter interventions to evaluate their differentiated impact on engineer mindset changes.

Identifying the Characteristics of Engineering Innovativeness

ABSTRACT The use of science and engineering skills to address the novel challenges of modern society through innovative solutions is regarded as an essential strategy around the world. Many of the studies on innovators, however, are not specific to engineers. To address this gap, this study explored engineers’ views of innovation and the attributes of engineers who create, develop, and implement innovations through in-depth interviews with expert engineering innovators. The study was set in an interpretivist framework and developed a socially constructed description of engineering innovativeness. Forty-five US-based expert engineering innovators were interviewed; these interviews were coded using a grounded-theory approach until categorical saturation was achieved. The results include the identification of 20 characteristics of engineering innovativeness, as well as an ‘engineer’s definition’ of an innovation and several general descriptors of ‘non-innovative’ engineers. The significance of this study comes from its use of detailed qualitative data gathered from peer-recognized innovative engineers from industry, entrepreneurial ventures, and academia to identify and define characteristics of engineering innovativeness in particular. The identification of these characteristics has implications for the training and development of engineers, for engineering team formation and management, and for programs, policies, and interventions aimed at supporting innovative behavior by engineers.