Infusing entrepreneurship in engineering education: Perceptions across campus

Abstract

The number of educational change processes aiming to infuse entrepreneurship in engineering education is increasing. Since these initiatives are a relatively new trend, it is interesting and necessary to understand different perceptions of entrepreneurship, especially among the central participants of the educational process. Accordingly, the aim of this study is to, through a qualitative method, investigate the existing perceptions of entrepreneurship as well as of entrepreneurship in engineering education among teachers and students from the bachelor programmes Bioengineering and Engineering Mathematics at Chalmers University of Technology. Eight semistructured interviews - four with teachers and four with students - were conducted and analysed using an inductive thematic approach. On the basis of these interviews, four different themes emerged: 1) entrepreneurship is associated with traits ascribed to a certain type of personality, 2) entrepreneurship is associated with the initial phase of starting up businesses, 3) entrepreneurship is associated with process management, and 4) entrepreneurship and basic research are perceived as hard to unify. The ability to learn how to become more entrepreneurial within the existing engineering education appears to depend on one’s view of entrepreneurship. The most decisive factor for this is the perceived attainability of one’s own image of the entrepreneur. Additionally, teachers and students do not seem to have a very clear image of how entrepreneurship is learnt, independent of one’s view of entrepreneurship. All in all, there exists a lot of different - and sometimes strong - perceptions of entrepreneurship and what entrepreneurship in engineering education is or could be. These perceptions will unavoidably influence the initiatives of infusing entrepreneurship in engineering education. In order to fully understand the preconditions for such educational change processes, these perceptions are an important factor to consider.