Teaching Entrepreneurship with Societal Impact to Engineering Students

As entrepreneurship educators, we often recommend that students "stay in their wheelhouse" and exploit their tacit knowledge during opportunity discovery and business model validation. We also hope that some of these nascent entrepreneurs will someday make an impact on the major crises affecting society including healthcare disparity and clean energy. Students are aware of these crises and that daunting challenges require even more resources outside their grasp, but few have the tacit knowledge on how to address them through entrepreneurship. How then can we prepare students to be entrepreneurs that make societal impact, or even convince them that this can be a viable future endeavor? We present a one-semester entrepreneurship course that, building on three pillars, teaches undergraduate students how to pursue societally significant opportunities. The first pillar is the distinction between tacit and codified knowledge as drivers of entrepreneurship. The second pillar is metacognition to broaden students' notion of "wheelhouse." The third pillar is the protocol of the federal Small Business Innovation Research program ("America's Seed Fund"). While the traditional context of these pillars is technology innovation, the course emphasizes the multidisciplinary collaboration required by societally significant solutions, and is attended by students from diverse disciplines. The course also exercises skills required to achieve such solutions, including forming strategic partnerships, navigating funding protocols, and grantsmanship. These skills are of value not only to future entrepreneurship, but also to societally significant careers in the corporate, academic, and public service settings.