Turning Engineers into Entrepreneurs

The future isn’t just built; it’s envisioned, designed, and marketed. For those learning engineering, the focus often naturally falls on the building part, but new innovations don’t just need to be created – they need to be successfully brought to the market if they’re going to make a difference. Preparing engineering students for this has always been necessary, as engineers who come up with new tech or solutions often find the business side of things the toughest part, but the tricky question is how. How do you marry engineering expertise with entrepreneurial skills, without derailing the traditionally rigid engineering curriculum? How do you teach students to view each engineering challenge not only as a problem to solve, but as an opportunity to innovate and drive forward?

A recent study by Jasmina Berbegal-Mirabent, Dolors Gil-Domenech, and Alba Manresa sheds light on this very intersection. Their research focused on engineering students at a university in Spain, where entrepreneurial activity is especially low and fear of entrepreneurial failure very high. The students took a course that was tailored to teach them about entrepreneurship alongside their regular engineering studies through challenge-based learning, built upon the principles of experiential learning, which emphasises learning through experience and reflection on doing. The students worked in teams and tackled projects that were connected to global issues, like the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations, as well as the actual impact of their projects on the city of Barcelona, where the study took place. The goal was to see how effective the course was at improving the students’ entrepreneurial skills, such as problem solving, creative thinking, and resource utilisation.