A MODEL FOR INTEGRATING ENTREPRENEURIAL INNOVATION INTO AN ENGINEERING CAPSTONE

There are many imperatives for incorporating ‘relevance’ into engineering education. Among the most pressing are the culminating experience of a ‘capstone’ and incorporation of instruction in ‘real-world’ applications and in innovative thinking. This paper will examine one approach for integrating entrepreneurship, innovation and real-world design into the engineering capstone experience. The paper will report on a recent multi-disciplinary capstone course that partnered with a small business enterprise. The project enrolled senior engineering students in four disciplines, along with a supporting cast from other colleges, in design of a product to fulfill real-world needs and constraints, a production system for its serial manufacture and a business enterprise for commercialization of product and production capability. The capstone experience included fabrication and test of a prototype product and multiple entries into regional and national competitions. Concluding commentary will … offer an opinion that matters as important as innovation and entrepreneurship ought not to be relegated to only elective or extracurricular status … extract lessons learned from this and companion projects … and offer suggestions for a generalization of this experience. The Context: One of the most important common characteristics of undergraduate engineering education is the universal requirement for a culminating learning experience. This is commonly referred to as a ‘capstone’, but is also often included in curricula under the older title of ‘senior design’. In whichever titling, the intent is to provide senior students with an integrated experience that requires a demonstration that the learning of subject matter and design methodology intended to be imparted in the major curriculum has been, in fact, absorbed and mastered. Capstone experiences vary in length and credits, but the observed norm seems to be a two-semester experience totaling six credits. At North Dakota State University, most engineering departments opt for this model, although one department compresses the six-credit experience into one semester. Another of the persistent imperatives that employers and accrediting agencies, and indeed the general public, insist upon is that undergraduate engineering curricula should prepare new graduates for rapid integration into the professional workforce. This requirement goes by various names, but is usually understood to encompass a ‘relevance’ of the educational process to performance expectations for engineers in the competitive industrial marketplace. Equally persistent is the challenge to the professoriate to devise learning processes whereby students will master both the essential engineering sciences and their utilization in practical application. Fledgling engineers must understand the science and method in such topics as thermodynamics, electrical circuitry, structural analysis and the like. In demonstrating such understanding, they typically must master the techniques for formulating problems, assembling appropriate data and equations, and calculating predicted values of parameters that describe performance of an engineering component or system. These exercises, however, are in most cases not sufficient in the ‘relevance’ measure. Students must also learn to apply engineering science in the design of articles, components and systems that are characteristic of industrial and P ge 1.54.2 commercial products. It is rarely true that mastering the engineering science automatically leads to effective utilization of those scientific precepts in practical design application. With somewhat less visibility than in the case for ‘relevance’, some further characteristics of the technological economy has been periodically urged upon the design of undergraduate engineering curricula -that of business understanding, of innovation and invention, of entrepreneurship. Traditional curricula have not addressed these matters, and for well and tried good reasons -to wit: curricula are over-full of credit requirements, and instruction in entrepreneurial thinking is often assumed to require new and separate courses. A Foundation: The challenge of blending understanding of engineering science with mastery in applications in design is often approached through project work. The capstone experience is an ideal platform for cementing these matters in the professional habits of new engineering graduates. The capstone is often a design project, where individuals or student teams progress through the stages of problem definition, analysis and synthesis to create a design for an engineering article. There are also many extra-curricular opportunities for students to learn valuable skills for integrating learning of fundamentals with applications in design. Such national projects as steel bridge, concrete canoe, mini-Baja, mini-Indy, quarter-scale tractor and similar activities are very popular and serve valuable purposes. Some universities incorporate projects of this sort into the capstone experience; others do not. Likewise, other universities sponsor entrepreneurial clubs that also provide valuable experiences for students. The atmosphere of entrepreneurial interest on and around the North Dakota State has been supported through a Center for Technical Enterprise, which acts primarily as an incubator for fledgling technological companies. As part of its charter, this Center engages the campus and surrounding communities in dialogue about and various forms of support for innovators, inventors and entrepreneurs. For several years, the Center also sponsored an after-hours seminar-cum-networking event for active and would-be entrepreneurs, the “5:01 Society”. As the spectrum of challenges outlined above was being examined, the author drew several conclusions from his prior experiences both in various industrial positions and in the professoriate. The epiphenomic conclusion is that something as important as entrepreneurship ought not to be relegated to only extra curricular status. In the Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Department, nearly every course is taught through the method of team-based projects. Students are challenged to apply fundamental principles through open-ended projects, and by the time of graduation every student will have experienced at least a dozen designoriented projects of durations varying from a month to a semester. What has been missing is an extension of the blending of fundamental engineering science with component and system design to also encompass the tenets of entrepreneurialism. The NDSU College of Engineering and Architecture has been experimenting with methods for integrating entrepreneurial thinking with engineering instruction since 2004.[1] These efforts have been primarily focused in extra-curricular teams that bring together students at every level for participation in a topic related to a professor’s research. While these ‘scholar teams’ were P ge 1.54.3 (and are) extra-curricular, it was hoped that they would spawn capstone projects that would extend the work into design of commercially-useful products. The motivation included the observation that a certain fraction of capstone projects normally will evolve designs of significant commercial potential. It was further observed that our college houses about one hundred team-based capstone projects each year, and it was speculated that if only a small fraction of these teams could be encouraged into an entrepreneurial extension immediately after graduation, the regional socio-economic impact would be very substantial.[2] The scholar-team movement inspired a parallel activity, starting in Autumn 2007. In that term, a for-credit activity was launched as a multi-disciplinary, multi-level, multi-year team project with learning objectives to develop skills and competencies for … translating laboratory research into commercial products and processes; creating and maintaining intellectual property; utilizing micro-technologies in medical and dental applications. These objectives are pursued through a project -currently development of a new concept in bone scaffolding.[1,3] This activity is known as the Bison Microventure (or Bοv) and is repeatable for credit by the students. At the time of this writing, the Bοv is in its sixth semester, with the leading students in their sixth and fourth repetitions. In its six semester history, the Microventure has enrolled twenty-seven students from eight majors in five colleges, with an average of about nine students per semester. The Spring 2010 enrollment is 12. The majority of students are majoring in Manufacturing Engineering or Zoology. An Approach to Blending the Capstone Experience with Entrepreneurial Opportunity: Because of the author’s association with entrepreneurial activity, an opportunity presented it self in Spring 2008 that grew into a multi-disciplinary capstone innovation team. As it happened, the College of Pharmacy at NDSU had been researching means for bringing professional pharmacist service to remote rural areas. The pharmacy study began in 2002 with the objectives of devising methodology for providing pharmacist care to underserved rural communities, using telecommunications technologies. The study focuses on operational and regulatory issues, with some essential emphasis on drafting model laws to permit telepharmacy operations at the state level. By Spring 2008, seventeen states had enacted legislation that permits remote operation of pharmacists, and fifty test sites had been established for the College of Pharmacy study, primarily in North Dakota and Minnesota. All of the test sites had been equipped with one-of workstations, assembled individually at each site by a private company working in partnership with the Pharmacy researchers. All of these workstations had been assembled from components available through retail outlets. The parts lists had, of course, evolved over the term of the pro