Team Negotiation Strategies in Entrepreneurship Education: Patterns Found in Engineering Students from Northern California and Santiago de Chile.

Abstract

A new way of doing engineering is rising. Particularly, accreditation criteria and local demands are requiring schools of engineering to transform engineering education by embracing entrepreneurship and innovation. Students need to be more prepared to address challenges of the industry through effective engineering design process. Nonetheless, we expect teams of students to able to overcome friction in any entrepreneurial endeavor with little or no instruction on how to work and orchestrate dissonance. This paper showcases context sensitive qualitative information from a team negotiation study conducted in two educational settings in North and South America. We describe two bottom-up negotiation strategies that become a shared pattern between the two research sites. Additionally, both group of students described a new mindset for doing things and solving real problems. Being comfortable with ambiguity is an emergent expected outcome from new way of teaching and learning engineering. Further findings could rise from collecting information in other research sites. A convergence in the negotiation patterns is expected. The techniques are visual in nature and have to the potential to be transferrable as concrete tools to be instructed in any engineering design curriculum.