Teaching Entrepreneurial Mindset to First Year Students through a Sponsored Innovation Challenge Competition

The goal of incorporating an innovation challenge in the first-year program is to initiate a mindset change in students, taking them from a traditional or fixed mindset to an entrepreneurial or growth mindset.When combined with the knowledge and skills gained in their academic programs, an entrepreneurial mindset will help students to navigate the rapidly evolving needs of the workforce with an enhanced resilience to failure and an understanding of the importance of value creation.The named Innovation Challenge, sponsored by a large multinational corporation, is an annual competition that supports the Wichita State University College of Engineering in fostering a culture of creativity, innovation, and teamwork among students.Teams of first-year students design and build a technologically feasible and economically viable product prototype, which is presented to a panel of industry judges, in a Shark Tank-style competition.Our theoretical background combines elements from two frameworks: the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) Entrepreneurial Mindset framework with the "3Cs" of Curiosity, Connections, and Creating Value, and Stanford d.school's Design Thinking, a human-centered design approach.We embed the preparation for this competition into our first-year experience program, called the Shocker Design Experience.We divide the preparation into two semesters: in the fall semester introductory course students learn to think with an entrepreneurial mindset as they begin their team project and then apply the first three steps of the design thinking process by conducting customer interviews (empathy), selecting a customer need to solve using technology (define), and then brainstorming solution ideas (ideate).Then, in the following spring semester, students continue their big idea in an applied project by designing and building a product prototype in the makerspace and learn business modeling by creating a business model canvas for their product.At the end of the spring semester, teams deliver an elevator pitch at the competition as their Session ETD 425 Proceedings of the 2025 Conference for Industry and Education CollaborationCopyright ©2025, American Society for Engineering Education "first-year capstone."Multiple pedagogical strategies are employed in this coursework, including student centered learning, flipped classroom, and mastery-based assessment.In addition, a requirement from the sponsor is to encourage multidisciplinary teams.The overall winning team advances to the National CEO Conference, Global Elevator Pitch Competition.This team is awarded a travel grant to attend during their third semester, and although sophomores, can often compete against upperclassmen entrepreneurship students.Our program began in 2016 with 150 students (90% engineers), and this past year we had nearly 450 students (70% engineers).Teams are formed during the first semester and continue through the spring competition.The top teams that go on to compete nationally at the Global Elevator Pitch Competition have regularly advanced to the semi-final round, as well as one team in 2019 competing in the final round.In the 2022-2023 academic year, participating students had a 77% retention rate, which is 6% above the college average.It has also been observed that students who have participated in the Shocker Design Experience are highly successful in future design projects and are hired for internships in part from their participation in the competition.In fact, one student on the 2021-2022 winning team was hired immediately after the competition by one of the judges from a large multinational corporation.We hypothesize that basing the course around an open competition provides students flexibility to discover and pursue their passions, a safe environment to explore failures, and a fun, engaging, and competitive environment.This improves their "grit" and curiosity which will impact their mindset for future design projects and careers.Since academic year 2021-2022, we have been tracking "grit" through retention rates and assessing students' entrepreneurial mindset using the Five-Dimensional Curiosity Scale [3] to measure students' curiosity in a pre-and post-survey.The results of these assessments are being compiled and will be published at a future date.Longitudinal studies are also being conducted to assess these students' progress and mindset in subsequent years through graduation.