"Engineering Management Thought of the Week" Jeff Glass

Many students of Engineering Management have some degree of interest in entrepreneurship because they are interested in starting their own business someday. In talking with industry representatives, we have found that there is a much broader role for entrepreneurship education within an Engineering Management curriculum. In particular, many companies want their technical/engineering employees to have a strong understanding of the numerous issues related to developing new business and the best way to satisfy this need is to take an entrepreneurship class or two. This is driven by a number of factors;

• The need for technical employees to interact with multiple business functions, thus their understanding of what drives these different functions is very valuable;

• One of the key issues in entrepreneurship is a deep focus on customer needs and understanding the value of a product to a customer need. This translates to any size company and insures that technical employees are not technology-minded but solutions-minded;

• Developing a complete business plan for an entrepreneurial endeavor provides technical/engineering students with an excellent overview of a business, thereby enabling them to more clearly understand decisions made by executives/firms regarding business strategy. This enables technical employees to spend less time complaining about strategic decisions and more time implementing! Without this broad overview of a business, technical employees tend to view every decision from their technology/engineering lens and thus do not understand the logic of such decisions.

• Finally, students who have studied entrepreneurship and worked with a team to write a business plan have shown their ability to: learn new areas quickly and from a business perspective, work with a team in a high pressure situation, conduct an in-depth business analysis on a new technology and present ideas concisely and persuasively.

To be sure, some companies/individuals will look at an entrepreneurship course and think that a student is not appropriate for a larger firm. They will automatically assume that a student will work for a short time and then leave the organization to start their own company, possibly competing with their organization. However, I have found that the numbers of individuals who take this approach are “few and far between”. Much more common are the individuals who are excited about the entrepreneurship studies that students undertake in engineering management and clearly understand the value of their firm in hiring such a student. In fact, they will automatically tend to think that such an employee will be innovative and “intrapreneurial” in their firm, providing a key competitive element to their technical staff. This will depend on the corporate culture and the individual, but more often than not, this is the case.

So as students consider which courses to take and areas to study, I would recommend that they do not rule out entrepreneurship simply because they don’t plan to start their own firm. Consider all of the learning that will accompany an entrepreneurship course or curriculum and make a decision based on such an analysis.