Engineering and Entrepreneurship: Creating Lasting Value from Engineering

Abstract

Engineers design new products, increase productivity, and thereby increase the standard of living worldwide. Although the common wisdom is that large corporations invest the most money in new product R&D, the surprising fact is that most discontinuous innovations come from small firms, and most engineers in the US are employed by entrepreneurial firms as well. In spite of the centrality of entrepreneurial skills to engineering practice, most engineering curricula focus on teaching techniques that will enable students to "build a better mousetrap," rather than to design for economic value. One way to rectify this situation is to push engineering curricula to be more entrepreneurial. The engineering curriculum of the future should include a series of courses designed to help engineers maximize both the entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial value of engineers. In partnership with business schools, engineering programs should design curricula that present a quantitatively rigorous and theoretically grounded approach to innovation. Central to this approach is the development of a market mentality that takes into account all of the relevant economic aspects of design, not simply relative advantage.