Offering an Entrepreneurship Course to All Engineering Students: Lessons Learned from ING2030 in Puc-Chile

Abstract

Entrepreneurial learning experiences have become one of the key aspects of the state of the art in engineering education. As such, technology-focused entrepreneurship courses have been incorporated to engineering curricula — both in developed and developing countries. Following this trend, the Engineering School at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC-Engineering) designed a third-year compulsory course on research, entrepreneurship, and innovation, whose objective is to provide students with entrepreneurial skills that transcend time. To continuously improve this course, the Engineering Education Unit at PUC-Engineering has been conducting pre- and post-surveys, assessing self-efficacy and learning benefits related to various course methods. This paper describes the main lessons learned as a result of using this data-centric approach throughout the last six academic periods. We found that the course is perceived as beneficial by most of its students, and that project feedback sessions and project presentations report the highest perceived learning benefits. Besides, we describe some of the improvements to the course that have been pushed by assessment data, showing the importance of using a data-driven approach for engineering entrepreneurship education.