To be completed the semester you take ENGR 490E for credit.
Policy and Procedures
The pedagogical intent of the Entrepreneurship Independent Study ENGR 490E is to provide an experiential learning activity for entrepreneurship minor students, supported by a faculty member from the student’s home college, the College of Engineering.
- The independent study must include a significant experiential learning activity (e.g., starting a business, writing a business plan for a business concept, an internship or co-op that incorporates entrepreneurial processes, participation in an accelerator program, etc.), and include some of the entrepreneurial processes as described below:
- Opportunity Recognition: the capacity to perceive changed conditions or overlooked possibilities in the environment that represent potential sources of profit or return to a venture
- Opportunity Assessment: the ability to evaluate the content structure of opportunities to accurately determine their relative attractiveness
- Conveying a Compelling Vision: the ability to conceive an image of a future organizational state and to articulate that image in a manner that empowers followers to enact it
- Creative Problem Solving/Imaginativeness: the ability to relate previously unrelated objects or variables to produce novel and appropriate or useful outcomes
- Risk Management/Mitigation: taking actions that reduce the probability of a risk occurring or reducing the potential impact if the risk were to occur
- Guerilla skills: the capacity to take advantage of one’s surroundings, employ unconventional, low-cost tactics not recognized by others, and do more with less
- Resource Leveraging: skills at accessing resources one does not necessarily own or control to accomplish personal ends
- Value Creation: capabilities of developing new products, services, and/or business models that generate revenues exceeding their costs and produce sufficient user benefits to bring about a fair return
- Building and Using Networks: social interaction skills that enable an individual to establish, develop, and maintain sets of relationships with others who assist them in advancing their work or career
- The ENGR 490E is used towards completion of the entrepreneurship minor.
- Currently Dave Sly, is the designated Faculty Advisor. In addition, other COE Faculty Entrepreneurship Fellows serve as a faculty advisor.
- Students must complete the Entrepreneurship Independent Study Agreement form.
Employment and internships do not constitute, in and of themselves, a sufficient basis for 490E credit. The internship must be experiential in nature and incorporate entrepreneurial processes to earn credit towards the entrepreneurship minor.