Intercollegiate Student Projects as Tools for Developing the Entrepreneurial Mindset and Competencies in Engineering Students: Lessons learned
Four Universities (Baylor University, University of Dayton, University of Detroit Mercy and Villanova University) have piloted a series of intercollegiate senior design projects in which students from different schools collaborate on senior projects. Two types of project structures are employed. The first has the teams collaborating on the customer discovery and ideation phase while building separate designs. The second has the teams collaborating all throughout the project up to delivery of a prototype that is assembled from components built by the various teams. Another variation of the projects has the students working with corporate clients (industry-sponsored projects), with individual clients (people with disabilities, inventors, etc.) or on competition projects. Also, the gender makeup of the teams varied with some predominantly male teams to others with balanced ratio of males to females. This rich mosaic of educational experiments will be presented with basic assessment and lessons learned.