Collaborating with Industry to Improve the Role of Business in Engineering (original) (raw)

Tech Prep: Seeding Technology Careers Via Michigan Tech University's Enterprise Program

2005 Annual Conference Proceedings

Since the fall of 2000, Michigan Technology University's undergraduate Enterprise Program (www.enterprise.mtu.edu) concept of cross-disciplinary problem solving and product generation has created active learning environments for undergraduate students across campus. Within the program, teams of students from a broad base of disciplines are provided an opportunity to work for several years in a businesslike setting to solve real-world engineering problems supplied by industry. Through participation in the program, Enterprise students are able to develop not only technical competence, but also an understanding of the practical application of skills and knowledge in areas such as communication, relationships, conflict resolution, leadership, teamwork, global markets and competition, environmental and social issues, ethics, and business. Michigan Tech strongly believes that in order to increase the numbers of minority and female students who select to enroll in technical programs, students must be introduced to engineering and science while they are in elementary and secondary school. For the last 30 years, Michigan Tech's Youth Programs (www.youthprograms.mtu.edu) have provided pre-college students opportunities to explore engineering and science-related fields through intensive summer workshops. In ten years of data tracking, approximately 35% of Youth Programs participants return for admission to the University after participation in the programs.

Educating Entry-level Engineers: Are Broad-based Business/Managerial Skills a Key to Sustaining the US Innovation-based Economy?*

2003

Fewer college-bound students are entering engineering in the United States than at any time in the last fifteen years. This can be attributed to relatively low entry-level salaries of traditional engineering, the perception that there is limited opportunity for significant long-term earning potential, and they are not being provided with the necessary business and entrepreneurial acumen. This paper presents a comparison of how our university is incorporating management and business topics throughout the curriculum with other leading engineering institutions to develop more entrepreneurial engineers. We also present study results justifying the focus of our efforts and some important lessons learned.

Engineering Technology Curriculum Development: Bridging the Gap between Academia-Industry through Undergraduate Final Year Project.pdf

International Journal of Academic Research in Progressive Education & Development, 2018

The Malaysia Higher Education sector has experienced major growth in the 60 years since its independence. In order for Malaysia to keep up with the increasingly challenging and competitive global economy, higher education must be sustainably transformed. One of the key shifts highlighted in the Malaysia Higher Education Blueprint 2015-2025 is through empowering Technology, Vocational, Education and Training (TVET) programmes. Although the graduates from the Malaysian Technical University Network (MTUN) have shown significant achievements through the Graduate Employability rates, there are some pressing issues that still need to be addressed. The industry practitioners have raised concerns about graduates that does not meet employers’ expectations and is not well-prepared to enter the workforce. As part of the initiative to address the gap above, the Engineering Technology Infrastructure Program (ETIM) at Universiti Malaysia Pahang (UMP) has taken the effort to appoint the industry practitioners as its Undergraduate Final Year Project (FYP) co-supervisors. These industry co-supervisors plays an important role since the beginning of the course by providing real-life industry problems for the students to propose solutions. This method have seen tremendous improvement towards students’ soft skills such as problem-solving and decision-making. This helps the graduates to better prepare themselves upon entering the workforce and simultaneously fulfilling the industry needs in being exposed to real-life industry problems. The industry and academia should continuously work together to ensure that the courses and curriculum are current and in accordance to the requirements posed by the industry.

Ac 2007-951: Engineering Entrepreneurship for High School and Early College Students

2007

Project Lead the Way, Inc. 1 is a national pre-engineering curriculum that involves partnerships among public schools, higher education, and the private sector to increase the quantity and quality of engineers and engineering technologists graduating. More than 660 state high school students are currently enrolled in the curriculum. The Engineering Design and Development (EDD) module is a capstone course for senior high school students, focusing on invention and entrepreneurial skills. Dr. Karen High serves as a trainer for this course. The module includes innovation and invention, and shows students how to take engineering one step further.

Technology Entrepreneurship Programs In U.S. Engineering Schools: An Analysis Of Programs At The Undergraduate Level

2010

This paper examines and characterizes current approaches to entrepreneurship education among undergraduate engineering programs based on initial data from two research studies and over a decade of grant-making and faculty development by the NCIIA to support new courses and programs in technology-based entrepreneurship education in the U.S. To understand the current status of entrepreneurship education in engineering, we have been examining programs and courses offered at 340 ASEE member schools in the U.S. Our analysis identifies entrepreneurship education opportunities that are available, and will provide a framework to understand and characterize diverse approaches to offering curricular and extracurricular experiences to undergraduate engineering students. The data gathered so far illustrates the growth of entrepreneurship education and its increasing accessibility to engineering students. Over half of the ASEE listed engineering programs provided entrepreneurship options with ~2...

The Gap Between Engineering Schools and Industry: A Strategic Initiative

Frontier in Education Conf., 2018

The long-standing gap between engineering education and the industry (the Gap) has been acknowledged in literature extensively. In this paper, the Gap has been addressed philosophically from three different aspects: the demarcation between science and engineering, the causes of the Gap, and the strategy for bridging the Gap. The targeted education level in this paper is the bachelor level. The Gap is caused by the absence of feedback from the industry to engineering schools. This paper contributes to the philosophy of engineering education by proposing a strategic initiative to bridge the Gap. The expected outcomes of the proposed initiative are the following: Reclassification of the majors available in engineering schools and redesigning the knowledge taught in these schools to match industry needs. These outcomes could be achieved by firstly giving engineers the opportunity to write about their own experience at an industry level in engineering journals and, through their writing, schools get an idea of what is going on in the industry. Secondly, accrediting agencies such as ABET should grant a higher rank to engineering schools based on what they have done over time to bridge the Gap. Lastly, PhD research could be utilized to improve the undergraduate curriculum. A PhD student could work for a company, then return to school two years later to present their findings and observations.

Integrating Business Concepts and Entrepreneurship into an Undergraduate Engineering Curriculum Using Case Studies

2011

The University of Waterloo, located at the heart of Canada's Technology Triangle, has a national reputation as the most innovative University in Canada, largely as a result of the success of its co-operative education program and its management of intellectual property. The University lays no claim to intellectual property generated by faculty, thus encouraging innovation. Waterloo started the first Canadian co-operative education program, engineering is 100% co-op, all programs offer a co-operative education option, and as a result Waterloo has one of the largest co-operative education programs in the world. Most engineering departments have a strong but conventional engineering curriculum, focussed on engineering science with a sprinkling of engineering design. All engineering programs require at least one course in engineering economics, and there are innovative programs to support students who have an entrepreneurial vision: a residence dedicated to students who wish to deve...

Entrepreneurial engineering education: what do graduates say

The present work aimed to understand the contribution of an engineering course in the training of professionals with creative and entrepreneurial characteristics through the perception of graduates from 2014 to 2019, from a College of a Federal Institution of Technology Education. From a universe of 119 subjects, 9 who became entrepreneurs were surveyed. The subjects' perception, relating their entrepreneurial perspectives and the development of possibilities offered by the engineering program, was evaluated using the Schein questionnaire, with 40 questions to identify career anchors. Semi-structured interviews were carried out to identify the subjects' perceptions about the contributions of the engineering course in the chosen career. The results pointed to aspects of engineering courses that can be improved, to awaken an entrepreneurial perspective in students