Fostering Entrepreneurial Mindset in an Engineering Statistics Course

In order to better prepare their students for the increasingly complex world, higher education institutions are more and more promoting entrepreneurial mindset and integrating entrepreneurship elements in their programs. Integration of entrepreneurially minded learning in engineering courses, which promotes entrepreneurial mindset and skills, is an approach that is gaining momentum among individual faculty members. This paper presents such effort involving a junior level engineering statistics course. Given the abundance of data in today's world and the importance of extracting meaning out of them, statistics is an important tool for any discipline including engineering. This importance is summed up in the following quote from Walter Shewhart, who is known as the father of statistical quality control: "The long range contribution of statistics depends not so much upon getting a lot of highly trained statisticians into industry as it does in creating a statistically minded generation of physicists, chemists, engineers and others who will in any way have a hand in developing and directing the production process of tomorrow."