FEIIC-International Conference on Engineering Education and Research 2015, Madinah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 19-21 December 2015

Three models of entrepreneurship education for engineering students

Mohd Zamri Murah, Zuraidah Abdullah, Hazilah Mohd Amin
Fakulti Teknologi Sains Maklumat
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
Malaysia
zamri@ukm.edu.my

ABSTRACT
Entrepreneurship activities has been shown to have a positive impact on economic growth and unemployment.
Thus, many governments have been trying to include entrepreneurship education into university education such
that many graduates would become entrepreneurs. However, the question what is the best method to teach
entrepreneurship education to non-business students remains. In this paper, we review three models for
entrepreneurship education. The faculty-level model is an entrepreneurship course for students where the
content materials were designed and created by the faculty and taught by the faculty. The university-model is an
entrepreneurship education for all freshmen students. It was created and designed by an external entity but was
taught and instructed by local professors. The collaborative-level model is designed and conducted by an
external entity for a selected group of students. The students came from a diverse background. In our
observations, the faculty-level model is useful to introduce basic entrepreneurship concepts, mind set and skill
sets to students. The collaborative-model is useful to nurture new entrepreneurship entities from students. The
university-level model needs some adjustments and improvements to achieve its target objectives.
Keywords: entrepreneurship education, faculty-level model, university-level model, collaborative-university
level model.

INTRODUCTION
Researches have shown that entrepreneurship have a positive impact on economic growth and reduce
unemployment. For these reasons, government and non-government organizations have been trying to start an
entrepreneurship revolution to boost the economy and reduce unemployment among graduates and youths.
Universities began to offer entrepreneurship courses to their students [1]. Prior researches had mixed results
about the impact of entrepreneurship education for non-business students [2].
Successes of high-tech companies such as Google, Yahoo, and YouTube from Silicon Valley have made hightech entrepreneurship among universities graduates a compelling reason for universities to teach
entrepreneurship education to universities graduates[3]. These companies were created by graduates during their
time at the universities. If current universities students were taught entrepreneurship skill set, regardless of their
academic domains, and they were able to start a company after graduation, it would help to boost the economic
and to reduce unemployment among graduates.
However, there has not been any consensus on how to include entrepreneurship education into universities
degree programmes. Should the course be taught during first year, second year or third year? Should we adopt
any of the entrepreneurship courses from successful universities such as Stanford or MIT? Should we use
simulation in the teaching process? Should we teach the students the skillsets only? Can we develop
entrepreneurship spirit and mindset among the students? Should the entrepreneurship courses be offered by the
business faculty? In this paper, we describe three models for entrepreneurship education that we have
experiences in creating, designing, instructing, and participating.

METHODS
In this section we describe the three models for entrepreneurship. The three models are faculty-level model,
university-level model and collaborative-university model.
A. Faculty-Level model

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FEIIC-International Conference on Engineering Education and Research 2015, Madinah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 19-21 December 2015

In the faculty-level model, the entrepreneurship module was conducted as a regular class, for all junior students
from all computer science fields. The activities included formal lectures, guest speaker from the industry and a
teamwork project. The class was based on a technology entrepreneurship textbook and similar technology
entrepreneurship class at Stanford University[4]. Extra content materials were videos from
http://ecorner.stanford.edu and http://tedx.com.
The learning outcomes were to expose the students to the concept of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship thinking
[5], entrepreneurship traits[6], innovation[7] and entrepreneurial skill sets. There were about 200 students from
computer science, multimedia, software engineering and system design programs. Many of the students did not
have prior experiences in entrepreneurship.
There were 14 weeks of 3 hours lectures. The students were required to form a team, and did a teamwork
project. The students were also taught business modeling canvas. The emphasis was on the early concept of
entrepreneurship, and less emphasis on financial aspect of the ventures. The content materials contain many
local examples and case studies.

Figure 1. Faculty-level model. Course materials are designed by the

lecturers, consists of local content. The focus is on entrepreneurship thinking
and skillsets.

B. University-Level model
In the university-level model, the entrepreneurship education was for the all freshmen students at the university.
The content materials were designed and created by an external entity. Professors from various disciplines were
trained using train-the-trainers courses to conduct the entrepreneurship classes. Thus, for example, we have a
professor from pharmacy being taught ideas and concepts of entrepreneurship. There were about 3000 students
from various faculties. In this model, the approach was student-centered, where the professors were the
facilitators. Student were given content materials beforehand, and the class sessions were for discussion and
knowledge sharing.

Figure 2. University-level model. In this model, the content

materials was designed and created by an external entity. The lecturer
are train using train-the-trainer course to handle the classes. Students
are form various academic programs such as medical, engineering,
pharmacy, computer science and law.

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FEIIC-International Conference on Engineering Education and Research 2015, Madinah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 19-21 December 2015

A major part of the content materials involved a web-based business simulation[8]. In the simulation, students
were responsible to manage the production, marketing and financial aspect of producing and marketing a
specific product. The simulation used was detailed and extensive. There were also local speakers, business plan
presentations contest and competition for the best simulation team.

C. Collaborative-level model
In the collaborative-level model, the content materials were designed and created by an external entity. This
model has been implemented in various countries for the past few years (http://gsl.mit.edu/). The duration of the
course was 1.5 months. The course included technical workshop, entrepreneurship mentoring, technical
presentation, opportunities assessment by the industry, and fast-paced software development. The course was
handled by instructors from the external entity, thus they were well qualified and had proper entrepreneurship
background. The instructors also had prior experiences in starting high-tech ventures. They also provided a
unique insight into technology entrepreneurship based on their own experiences and networking. Students for
this course were selected from a list of applications. The students came into the course with various background
such as multimedia, web design, marketing, software development and marketing. The diversity in the team was
important to make sure that team composition was optimal.
In the course, among other thing, the students were taught finding opportunities in solving other peoples
problems, how to measure potential market size, how to create a minimum viable product, and how to iterate
customer requests[9].

Figure 3. Collaborative model. In this model, content materials are

designed by the external entity. There are close collaboration between
the students, external coordinator and entrepreneursip community.

There was a close collaboration between the university, the government funding agency, the external entity, and
the high-tech entrepreneurship community. The community would came and gave feedbacks to the students.
The students had the opportunities to get honest feedbacks from the community. If a project was deem unviable,
the students were told so. If a project had a potential market value, the community would help in launching the
product. At the end of the course, the students would create a minimum viable product that were ready for precommercialization. We summarize the three model in TABLE I.

RESULTS
For each models, exit surveys were taken from participating students. The surveys were used to measure the
effectiveness of the models.
In the faculty-level model, the average rating was about 4.2 on the 5 point scale. Some of the problems we found
were lack of entrepreneurship background, the need to emphasis on entrepreneurial thinking, the need to
develop entrepreneurial skill sets, and the need to combine knowledge from other computer science. Overall, we
get positive feedbacks.

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FEIIC-International Conference on Engineering Education and Research 2015, Madinah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 19-21 December 2015

TABLE I.

THE THREE MODEL FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION.

Content
materials

Faculty level
Created and developed by faculty
members, have local content

University level
Created and developed
by external entity,
minimal local contents

Taught by

Faculty members

Students
Outcome

~ 250
Entrepreneurship thinking, skill
sets

Faculty members were

given train-the-trainers
by external entity on how
to conduct the content
materials
~ 3000
Entrepreneurship
thinking, skill sets

Teaching
method
Authors role

Lecture, team project, local

contents, small group discussion
Created, designed and conducted
the class

Student-centered,
business simulation
Conducted the class

Collaborative
Created and developed
by external entity, based
on courses conducted by
MIT
members from external
entity

~ 30
Minimum viable product
(MVP) to the market,
pre-commercialization
product
Workshop, hand on, fast
paced, technical session
Participate in the class

In the university-level model, a survey were taken from all participating students from all the faculties involves.
The faculties involved are medical, social science, law, business, computer science, engineering, dentistry and
pharmacy. Overall, the results were mixed. Some students gave positive response, while some students gave
negative responses. In the medical faculty, some 61% students surveyed indicated that the course should be
modified to achieve its objectives [10]. Our observations indicated that the students had problem understanding
the finance module and the simulation module. The students said there were too much emphasis on financial and
simulation, and less on basic entrepreneurial thinking and skill sets. We opined that the content materials was
too much for an introductory entrepreneurship class.
Two issues was highlighted during the course reviews. Firstly, there were many students with many different
background. Some of the content materials were easy for some students, and but difficult for some other
students. The course was student-centered, however many of the students did not read the materials before class.
Secondly, the idea where an external entity can trained engineering professors, pharmacy professors and, other
non-business professor to conduct entrepreneurship class was not fully achieved. Even though the professors
were expert in their domains, it would be difficult for them to understand the domain of entrepreneurship only
after taking one or two weeks training course in entrepreneurship. We opined that one size fit all doesnt fit all.
In the collaborative-model, all the students successfully completed minimum viable products, and did presented
the products to the high-tech community. A few were selected to go into the market after more improvements.
Responses from the students were mostly positive, except for some logistic issues such as accommodations, and
technical problems. This course had successfully created a few high-tech entrepreneurs.

DISCUSSIONS
We have discuss three models for entrepreneurship education [11]. In this section, we discuss on how to adapt
any of these models to include entrepreneurship education for engineering students.
In the faculty-level model, the entrepreneurship education is created and designed by faculty members who have
engineering, business or entrepreneurship background. This includes professors or instructors who have
experiences in working with startups, run an outside engineering projects or do consulting for outside sources.
These professors are the link to the entrepreneurship community, and they can provide ample materials for the
course. The content materials can contain local case study. A good inter-networking with local engineering
entrepreneur community is important. The focus is to develop entrepreneur mindset or thinking and skill sets.
This model is suitable for introductory course for senior or junior students. Instead of having weekly lectures,
the content materials can be based on workshops or seminars.
In the collaborative model, an external entity will provide the content materials and the instructors. Their
experiences in conducting similar course will be a great learning experiences for the students and the professors

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FEIIC-International Conference on Engineering Education and Research 2015, Madinah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 19-21 December 2015

involve. This model is suitable for advanced students. However, a good mix of students are required. The
students shall come from different engineering background, and can include students from other faculties. The
minimum viable product can be used to solve real life local problems such as garbage collection, water
contamination, lack of electricity, mobility for disable people, and guide for blind people and others.
In the university level model, content materials is created by an external entity. Local professors and instructors
are trained to deliver the content materials. Our observation is that, often the professor or the local instructors
have difficulty in delivering the core essence of the content materials. This make the materials dry and
uninteresting. No local content is includes. The use of simulation as a teaching tools at an introductory level of
entrepreneurship education also have varying responses. The simulation also focus on manufacturing, rather
than basic entrepreneur thinking skills. Many students in our class express frustration in failing to understand the
whole simulation exercises.

CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we describe three models for entrepreneurship education. We also discuss the implementations and
the exit surveys results. We concluded that a model for a successful entrepreneurship education must take into
consideration content materials, students prior experiences, learning outcomes, entrepreneurship community
involvement, and capacity of the teaching faculty. For an introductory engineering entrepreneurship class, a
suitable model is a faculty-level model taught by faculty members using locally created and designed contents.
For more advanced engineering entrepreneurship, a suitable model is a collaborative-model where the course is
conducted by external entity that have prior engineering entrepreneurship.
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