Assessment of Entrepreneurial Skills: Experience From a Joint Engineering-Business Class Experiment

Abstract

This paper discusses selected preliminary results from a collaborative efforts between undergraduate engineering and business students working together on a joint semester-long project. The project, though common for all students, was simultaneously a requirement in two, parallel run courses, one in engineering and another one in business. The cohort of participating students was fairly large, and involved about 240 second year students from engineering and 50 fourth year from business.The information about students' attitudes and project teams dynamics was collected by means of two surveys, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the courses, and also through a peer-evaluation software platform.This experiential learning efforts is one of the first in North America of this size to combine multidisciplinary entrepreneurial teams at the undergraduate level.