An Integrated Approach to Entrepreneurship

Dr Perry Armstrong, School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, Queen’s University,

Belfast. Email: pj.armstrong@qub.ac.uk

Abstract
For the past three years the School has been running a team-based Stage 4 project which serves
as a “capstone” project, as well as a vehicle for training students in entrepreneurship. The student
teams are tasked with designing and developing an innovative product, while also drawing up a
business plan for a start-up company to market the product. Supporting courses are integrated with
the project in order to provide essential knowledge and skills that students have not covered in the
earlier years of their degree programme.

Background and reasons for the project

When the new team-based Stage 4 project was introduced, the School’s planning decisions were
influenced by a number of factors, including the following:

• Historically the local economy had been performing poorly in terms of the overall level of
entrepreneurial activity. Various local agencies had stressed the need for major initiatives in
order to rectify this situation.
• A new team-based project was required in Stage 4 of the School’s MEng programme in
Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering in order to satisfy SARTOR 3.
• Participation in the Formula Student competition by the School’s Stage 3 students had
demonstrated the advantages of team-based design and build projects, in terms of student
motivation, knowledge application and the development of important practical and
professional skills.
• The School had become involved in an international initiative to reform engineering
education, called the CDIO Initiative. The main premise of this initiative is that engineering
graduates should be able to conceive, design, implement and operate value-added products
and systems.

An existing Stage 4 Marketing and Business Planning course included a team-based assignment,
where each team had to produce a business plan for a hypothetical company set up to market an
innovative product. Student feedback indicated that the marketing assignment was both enjoyable
for the students and successful in educational terms.

Taking all of the above into account, it was decided that a new team-based Stage 4 project would
be introduced that combined the existing marketing assignment with an engineering project on the
design and development of the “innovative product” chosen (by the students) for the marketing
assignment. This, it was felt, would provide realistic and appropriate exposure to entrepreneurship
for an engineering undergraduate. It would also satisfy the SARTOR requirements and cover the
full spectrum of activities identified as important in the CDIO Initiative. Finally it would have the
same potential benefits at Stage 4 as Formula Student was delivering at Stage 3, with the added
dimension of linking engineering decision making with marketing and business objectives and
constraints.

Key Features
The Stage 4 project and its supporting elements account for the equivalent of 2½ modules out of
the 6 modules that make up the Stage 4 curriculum.
The new Stage 4 project was introduced in 2002/3 and it requires each student team to:

(a) Generate an idea for an innovative new product.

(b) Form a hypothetical company to design, develop and market the product, with designated
roles (and titles) for each team member.
(c) Conduct a detailed market analysis, including the identification and assessment of
competing products.
(d) Create a design specification for the chosen concept.
(e) Generate and evaluate alternative design concepts for the product.
(f) Employ appropriate engineering science along with available CAE tools during design
analysis.
(g) Produce a detailed design, or designs, including CAD models and engineering drawings.
(h) Build and test a product prototype or, if this is not possible, use or build experimental
facilities in order to test critical features of the proposed design.
(i) Develop the product on the basis of the test results until it meets its design specification.
(j) Produce a detailed business plan (ostensibly for potential investors) covering the financial,
business, technical, manufacturing and personnel aspects of setting up a company in order
to market the product.

What skills and abilities are enhanced and developed?

In part, the new Stage 4 project is a “capstone” project, in the sense that it enables students to
apply the engineering science, design skills and computing expertise they have acquired in earlier
years. However, previous exposure to entrepreneurship is limited to a few lectures in Stage 2 and
Stage 3. These lectures are provided to encourage students to spend some time considering new
business and product ideas, partly in preparation for the Stage 4 project. However, full exposure to
entrepreneurship is left to the final year. This is deliberate because, by this stage, students have a
degree of competence with the technical side of product design and development, and are
therefore in a better position to cope with the marketing and business aspects. This does however
mean that students need additional knowledge and skills, that have not been provided prior to
Stage 4. Hence it was necessary to revise the curriculum at Stage 4, in order to incorporate
additional taught elements.

The additional elements introduced into the Stage 4 curriculum are shown in the upper part of
Figure 1.

Figure 1
Entrepreneurship Guest Lectures

Marketing &
Innovation
Business Planning

Product Design
Idea for STAGE 4 ENGINEERING & Prototype
Innovative
Product & MARKETING PROJECT
Business Plan

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As previously mentioned, the Marketing and Business Planning course shown already existed. It
serves to provide the students with appropriate techniques and practical help with all of the “non-
engineering” aspects of the project, from generating ideas for an original product to drawing up a
business plan. Included are lectures on market research, strategic planning, product pricing,
consumer behaviour, advertising, business ethics, leadership and presentation skills. The course is
now complemented with a separate set of lectures on Entrepreneurship, which cover the specific
knowledge required by the entrepreneur. The lectures deal with the formation of start-up
companies, alternative business models, sources of finance and advice, management topics and
legal issues.

Guest lectures are also arranged to cover gaps in the students’ knowledge and provide
background on more specialised issues. Topics covered have included project management,
patenting and IPR, risk assessment, the EC Machinery Directive, team building, HR, quality
auditing and rapid prototyping. In addition guest lecturers have been invited from design
consultancies and design departments in companies, in order to present specific case studies and
discuss their experiences with the students.

The lectures on Innovation have the specific aim of placing the Stage 4 project in a wider context.
They focus on the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship to individual companies and the
economy in general. The lecturer also reviews the characteristics of innovative companies and the
role of research and development in industry. In addition the management of innovation and new
product introduction are discussed. The intention is that the students will appreciate the importance
of the knowledge and skills they are acquiring in the project, and understand how companies deal
with the challenges of innovation.

The Stage 4 project and its supporting elements account for the equivalent of 2½ modules out of
the 6 modules that make up the Stage 4 curriculum. This illustrates the importance that the School
places on entrepreneurship. Having said that, the project also provides an important platform for
developing a wide range of personal, interpersonal and professional skills. These include skills
that do not traditionally feature in an engineering curriculum, such as independent thinking, both
critically and creatively, dealing with uncertainty, and the skills involved in problem formulation, as
distinct to those involved in problem solving. It is also a basic tenet of the CDIO Initiative that
students should develop more of the skills they will need as professional engineers, and the new
Stage 4 project provides an important opportunity for students to significantly broaden their skills
base.

What is the role of the lecturer?

Stage 4 students are generally mature individuals, who will shortly be taking up posts of
responsibility in the “real world”. By way of preparation, the School believes that they should be
given as much individual and collective responsibility as possible. Hence project supervision is
deliberately approached with a “light touch”. Normally two members of staff are appointed as
“technical” supervisors for each student team, once the nature of the team’s innovative product is
known. The students are also told that they can consult any member of staff they believe has
appropriate expertise. However, all staff act as “advisers” rather than traditional project
supervisors.

Three co-ordinators oversee the running of the projects, with one concentrating on guiding the
teams through the preparation of their business plans. The latter co-ordinator is the lecturer
responsible for the Marketing and Business Planning course. He is a professional marketing
consultant with a natural talent for enthusing and motivating the students.

The support course and lectures are an essential part of the overall “package” at Stage 4. As
noted, Marketing and Business topics are covered by an experienced marketing consultant. The
lectures on Innovation are delivered by a Senior Lecturer in Innovation, who holds a post at the

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University funded by a local bank. The lectures on Entrepreneurship are presented by a Teaching
Fellow in Entrepreneurship, whose post is funded by the Northern Ireland Centre for
Entrepreneurship, which is run jointly by the University and the University of Ulster. The fact that
all of the above have professional expertise in their subject areas is an important factor in the
success of the initiative.

How is the module assessed?

Assessment is based on team presentations, the teams’ business plans, team and individual
reports and supervisors’ evaluations of student performance. The Innovation and
Entrepreneurship lectures and the Business and Marketing Planning course are also followed by
written examinations, and the former incorporates an additional assignment. The teams make two
“technical” presentations; including an “early” presentation to encourage the teams to define their
objectives and produce a project plan as early as possible. The teams then make a final technical
presentation on the engineering aspects of the project. A group of staff attend and mark the
technical presentations. In a separate third presentation, the teams present their business plans to
an invited panel, which includes appropriate guests such as industrialists and bank managers.

Examples of Projects
The most difficult part of the project for many student teams is generating their initial idea for an
innovative product. Ideally the product idea should come from the students, since the team will
then have “ownership” and, in our experience, will tend to promote and defend their idea more
vigorously. In some cases individual students propose innovative products that have been
suggested to them by family members or friends. Providing the student can convince the other
team members of the merits of proposal, this is acceptable. From time to time product ideas are
also submitted to staff in the School by companies or external organisations. Having given the
teams a period of time to come up with their own ideas, these are brought to the attention of the
students. In the final resort, the staff responsible for co-ordinating the projects will suggest product
ideas to any team that has failed to produce one of its own, but this has rarely been required.

By way of illustration, one of last year’s teams felt that it would be worthwhile to develop a gearbox
for a wheelchair, in order to facilitate hill climbing. As with all student teams, they were
encouraged to seek out groups and individuals in the local community when undertaking their
market research. In this case they consulted wheelchair users, staff at an orthopaedic hospital and
a local wheelchair manufacturer. They discovered that a more important and fundamental problem
was stopping a wheelchair from rolling backwards. As a result they changed the project to one
involving the design, development and marketing of an anti-roll back system for wheelchairs.
Figure 2 shows CAD models the team produced to explore different design concepts.

Figure 2

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Another of last year’s teams became aware of a problem in nasal surgery through a relative.
Consultants in this area have a requirement for flexible forceps to enable them to reach into the
patient’s nasal passages. The team set about satisfying this requirement, having refined the design
specification through interviews with surgeons, and other relevant medical staff. The device
developed by the team is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3
MEDICYTE

A further project from last year arose from a problem raised by the Northern Ireland Ambulance
Service. When critically ill patients are transferred on stretchers by ambulance they are normally
accompanied by various heavy items of monitoring and life sustaining equipment. This tends to be
unsecured, which creates difficulties when the stretcher is moved, and poses obvious dangers
when the ambulance is braking or cornering at speed. The challenge faced by the team was to
design and develop an equipment carrier for a typical complement of equipment that could easily,
but securely, be attached to a stretcher and quickly removed when required. A CAD model and a
photograph of the prototype carrier developed by the team are shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4

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Evidence of success
All students complete a comprehensive questionnaire at the end of the year. Their views assist
with efforts to continuously improve the project. Ideas gained from participation in the CDIO
Initiative also inform the process. A point consistently made by the students is that they recognise,
for the first time, the extent to which marketing and business factors impinge on product design
and development. This is an important lesson for any engineering graduate interested in becoming
an entrepreneur.

It is evident to staff that the students gain in confidence during the course of the project. They
come to realise that they have the ability to carry an initial idea through to a physical product and a
credible proposal for setting up a company. Team spirit tends to be excellent and students have
no difficulty with the role-playing involved in assuming company titles and responsibilities. In fact a
number of teams have had company T-shirts printed, along with other publicity material. The team
ethic is reinforced by the fact that the teams are encouraged to enter various competitions for
original product or business ideas. There are many such competitions, and a number of teams
have won prizes, including one of £10,000, which was shared between the four members of the
team. As with Formula Student the competitive element serves to increase team spirit, motivation,
and student work rate.

Reflections and future developments

More engineering graduates need to become entrepreneurs, or adopt entrepreneurial attitudes
within the companies they work for. The School believes that the best preparation is a holistic
project that effectively simulates the complete process of transforming an idea into a marketable
product. To be successful, such a project has to be driven by the students, which in turn means
that they have to be given more responsibility than would normally be the case.

In terms of the future development of the Stage 4 project, the difficulties faced by students when
asked to generate an initial idea for an innovative product need to be addressed. The introduction
of assignments involving the generation of original product ideas in earlier years is one possibility
under consideration. Students have also exposed various weaknesses in the School’s systems
and facilities that have delayed the progress of their projects. The underlying problem is that
engineering schools are not generally resourced to support the transformation of a product idea
into a working prototype within the space of an academic year. The School is working to improve
this situation.

Another issue that needs attention is assessment. Although it has been considered, peer
assessment has not been introduced, mainly because a significant proportion of the students have
rejected the idea in their end-of-year questionnaires. The general view is that it would be
detrimental to the building of team spirit. It would also be preferable if teams used peer pressure to
ensure that every team member is making a full contribution to the project. To date, this appears
to have happened, but the situation is being kept under review.

It could be argued that focusing on entrepreneurship is somewhat illogical since few engineering
graduates actually become entrepreneurs. However, the School is satisfied that the underlying
characteristics and skills that the Stage 4 project develops are important to all engineering
graduates. These relate, in the main, to the promotion of self-confidence, the development of a
willingness to take initiatives, and the ability to work effectively in a team on a realistic and complex
task for an extended period of time. In the absence of any other opportunities to develop these
characteristics within the undergraduate curriculum, it is felt that the Stage 4 project performs a
valuable role, whether or not the graduate is a potential entrepreneur.