Fostering Technology Entrepreneurship through a Project‐Based Learning Community

This project will contribute to the national need for well‐educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high‐achieving, low‐income students with demonstrated financial need at Western Carolina University. Over its six‐year duration, this project will fund scholarships to thirty‐six unique full‐time students who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in engineering or technology.

First year students will receive four‐year scholarships. Transfer students will receive up to three‐year scholarships. The project aims to cultivate entrepreneurial thinking among undergraduates in engineering and technology by involving a cohort of students across academic years in an intensive learning community to bring their technology‐oriented product ideas from inception to market.

Scholarship recipients will be linked with campus resources, local industry partners and experts, faculty mentors, and cohort teaming sessions to propose, critique, select, develop, and implement commercially viable technology products. The project will be tightly integrated within a project‐based learning curriculum that leverages state‐of‐the‐art prototyping facilities and will be augmented to include training in business case development, product launch and small business startup.

The novel approach to engineering education developed through this project will serve to enrich the creative potential of new graduates in technical fields and to expand small business creation and employment, both of key importance to growth in rural regions like western North Carolina where there may be fewer large mainstream employers. The project will also include advance the state of the art in entrepreneurship education by extending conventional engineering curricula to include business aspects of technology innovation and commercialization.

The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low‐income, high‐achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. Toward this goal, the project will specifically aim to promote entrepreneurial thinking among students, to increase student engagement with engineering and business training through the development of entrepreneurial goals, and to increase the diversity of regional technology entrepreneurs to include a greater presence of native Appalachian participants.

Key qualities, or dimensions, of those who possess an entrepreneurial mindset will often include the presence of a growth mindset, a regular practice of creativity, and high personal self‐efficacy. As entrepreneurism is seen as an enabling force to overcome employment and income divides between urban and rural job markets, dimensions of entrepreneurship that are skills‐based, and can be taught, are of high interest.

The project will investigate the impacts of the learning community on learned dimensions of the entrepreneurial mindset and will examine the effects of program interventions on entrepreneurism in scholarship recipients as compared with other students in the host department. The project will significantly advance the state of the art in entrepreneurship education and pedagogy that integrates business aspects of entrepreneurism and into engineering and technology curricula.

The project will be evaluated based on both quantitative and qualitative data collected through surveys, reflection essays, small group interaction summaries, and interviews. Project efficacy will be drawn from the quality of scholar‐generated outcomes including reception at pitch events, patent applications, successful product launches, product evolutions to graduate research, externally funded partnerships, and employment opportunities.

These and other noteworthy events will be publicized via social and other media. Project investigators will publish findings through pedagogical research venues such as ASEE, IEEE, and others. This project is funded by NSF’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low‐income academically talented students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields.

It also aims to improve the education of future STEM workers, and to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low‐income students.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.