Informed Design through the Integration of Entrepreneurial Thinking in Secondary Engineering Programs

Abstract

Competitive growth in today’s economy is believed to necessitate individuals to possess more than the technical skills required to develop novel designs to include entrepreneurial thinking capabilities. An entrepreneurial mindset can enable people to think and then act in a certain way to discover, evaluate, and exploit opportunities by understanding the value proposition of a new idea, identifying the potential market, and adapting ideas to meet the needs and desires of various customer segments. However, secondary students often lack formalized opportunities to upon the ideas they develop during their high school experiences and transform those ideas into reliable investments of time and resources. Therefore, we propose that secondary engineering teachers can employ established entrepreneurial pedagogical interventions as a means to promote more authentic engineering design activities in STEM learning environments, aid students in making more informed design decisions, engage students in developing viable solutions to authentic problems while investigating opportunities for exploiting their ideas, and thus, supporting the innovation capabilities of our future. Consequently, this article highlights methods in which to integrate an entrepreneurial mindset within high school STEM classrooms, specifically those focused on engineering.