Examining development of the entrepreneurial mind-set in engineering students

We have employed a survey used by the KEEN network to investigate the development of the entrepreneurial mind-set in control courses where innovation and entrepreneurship were not specifically taught and compared these to courses where innovation and entrepreneurship were a central part of the learning objectives. Surprisingly, the results showed that there was a weak trend (not statistically significantly) showing a positive development in the entrepreneurial mind-set in the control courses. Furthermore, the students score themselves very high on the questions posed, both before and after a course. The results raise questions about the adequacy of the surveys used as the only tool for quantifying development of the entrepreneurial mind-set in engineering students. It also indicates that more parameters must be included in a study. Those could for example be to investigate if the faculty teaching courses apply a growth mind-set as their teaching strategy. Such a strategy in itself can be a reason for students to experience that they develop on the traits that define an entrepreneurial mind-set in the KEEN survey. To shed further light on this, DTU and EPFL have initiated an inter-university collaboration and the results will be presented in a future reports.