Designing Entrepreneurial Engineers Part I: Opportunity Identification

Abstract

Engineering programs are increasingly seeking to prepare graduates who can create value under uncertainty; however, entrepreneurship and engineering education are often delivered as disjointed learning experiences.  This paper presents Part I of a two-course entrepreneurial capstone framework that sequentially integrates entrepreneurship and engineering design.  In Part I student teams propose and refine student-sponsored venture ideas using a structured, hypothesis-driven approach. The course is organized as three interacting stages: 1) venture intent, 2) evidence-driven opportunity discovery, and 3) concept convergence. Each stage is executed through agile sprints supported by a flipped lecture model. Teams translate ideas into testable hypotheses, gather evidence through primary and secondary research sprints, and use experiments and low fidelity prototyping to justify convergence or pivots. The course culminates in a requirements-ready concept package consisting of user stories, and a preliminary design that feeds into the subsequent course, Part II – Systems Engineering and Agile Prototyping.