Paper Authors

Abstract

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

An Integrative Approach to Teaching Entrepreneurship to Non-Business Majors

Dale W. Jasinski, Matthew O’Connor, Chad Nehrt and Kathleen Simione Associate Professors of Management, Finance, International Business, Accounting respectively Quinnipiac University 275 Mount Carmel Avenue, Hamden, CT 06518 USA Tel: 203 582-3388 E-mail: dale.jasinski@quinnipiac.edu

Introduction

Entrepreneurship education at institutions of higher education is becoming increasingly popular. Overcoming the old notion that entrepreneurs were born, not made, a survey of United States professors found that 93% felt that entrepreneurship could be taught1. Indeed, it is estimated that today there over 2200 courses in entrepreneurship being taught at over 1600 universities throughout the United States2. Karl Vesper, a leading entrepreneurship educator at the University of Washington suggests:

“The radical rise in the number of schools that offer courses and programs in entrepreneurship is part of a much broader fabric not only in society, but the world over. As it turns out, you can see big organizations breaking themselves down into small units, unions are crumbling to smaller sizes, the Catholic Church is shrinking, and even countries like the Soviet Union have broken up.” 3

While business schools tend to be the primary domain for these courses, sociology, engineering, home economics, and vocational education departments are also offering education in this domain1. In the case of engineering students, some schools are seeing the need to incorporate the elements of entrepreneurship education as a response to the changing nature of placement opportunities for their graduates as increasing emphasis is being placed on the skills of advocacy, idea development, and lateral thinking.4 Many universities offer a single course in entrepreneurship or even minors or majors in the topic. Indeed, reputations of schools have been built based on their emphasis of an entrepreneurial focused education. Yet, despite this increased attention on a topic whose vary nature promotes innovation and creativity, there seems to be little variation in the approach to entrepreneurship education taken at the university level.5,6

The purpose of this paper is present a case study that examines over a three year period

“Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2004, American Society for Engineering Education

• Citation

• Format
  • APA
  • APA - LaTeX bibitem
  • MLA
  • MLA - LaTeX bibitem
  • Bibtex
  • EndNote - RIS

O'Connor, M., & Simione, K., & Jasinski, D., & Nehrt, C. (2004, June), An Integrative Approach To Teaching Entrepreneurship To Nonbusiness Majors Paper presented at 2004 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--13167