An official website of the United States government
This paper focuses on how former collegiate student entrepreneurs define failure and compares their definitions with how academic literature has traditionally defined entrepreneurial failure. The article examines the context by which collegiate student entrepreneurs, and more specifically student entrepreneurs who studied an engineering discipline, start their venture, and how that influences their perceptions of what entrepreneurial failure is. Entrepreneurial failure and its importance to the field of entrepreneurship is discussed almost as frequently as entrepreneurial success. In fact, learning from failure and learning to fail quickly as a means to assist in advancing toward success are often discussed as fundamental key attributes of successful entrepreneurs. Despite this, factors that influence and contribute to entrepreneurial success and how to increase entrepreneurial success through support mechanisms are far more understood than methods that would help support entrepreneurs in learning from failure, or finding ways to fail early and often in a way that helps them as opposed to discouraging or demoralizing them. Given the rapid increase and interest within colleges of engineering in introducing and exposing students to entrepreneurial experiences, and also in developing programs that help students start entrepreneurial ventures, it is timely to better understand the experiences of these student entrepreneurs, particularly the largest percentage of them who started ventures that failed. While the importance of learning from failure is often repeated in the literature, this paper highlights distinct differences between how collegiate entrepreneurs define failure, compared with more traditionally researched non-collegiate entrepreneurs, and also outlines how the various contexts by which students become involved in an entrepreneurial endeavor influences their perception of how failure is defined.
more »
« less
Engineering Students Definitions of and Perceptions of Entrepreneurial Failure
This paper focuses on how former collegiate student entrepreneurs define failure and compares their definitions with how academic literature has traditionally defined entrepreneurial failure. The article examines the context by which collegiate student entrepreneurs, and more specifically student entrepreneurs who studied an engineering discipline, start their venture, and how that influences their perceptions of what entrepreneurial failure is. Entrepreneurial failure and its importance to the field of entrepreneurship is discussed almost as frequently as entrepreneurial success. In fact, learning from failure and learning to fail quickly as a means to assist in advancing toward success are often discussed as fundamental key attributes of successful entrepreneurs. Despite this, factors that influence and contribute to entrepreneurial success and how to increase entrepreneurial success through support mechanisms are far more understood than methods that would help support entrepreneurs in learning from failure, or finding ways to fail early and often in a way that helps them as opposed to discouraging or demoralizing them. Given the rapid increase and interest within colleges of engineering in introducing and exposing students to entrepreneurial experiences, and also in developing programs that help students start entrepreneurial ventures, it is timely to better understand the experiences of these student entrepreneurs, particularly the largest percentage of them who started ventures that failed. While the importance of learning from failure is often repeated in the literature, this paper highlights distinct differences between how collegiate entrepreneurs define failure, compared with more traditionally researched non-collegiate entrepreneurs, and also outlines how the various contexts by which students become involved in an entrepreneurial endeavor influences their perception of how failure is defined.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2024570
- PAR ID:
- 10466264
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASEE 2023 Annual Conference & Exposition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
null (Ed.)Entrepreneurial education has been rapidly expanding within universities over the past 15 years with colleges of engineering being amongst the most active participants in embedding entrepreneurship into curricular and cocurricular activities (Pittaway & Cope, 2007). Well-developed and theoretically grounded educational interventions have been shown to increase entrepreneurial skills and perception among students. (Pittaway & Cope, 2007; Matlay & Caray, 2007; Duval-Couetil & Wheadon, 2013; Duval-Couetil & Rheed-Roads, 2012). Organizations including the National Science Foundation through the Lean Launch Curriculum and I-Corps program, VentureWell through curriculum development grants and their E-Team program, and the Kern Family Foundation through the Kern Entrepreneurial Education Network (KEEN) have provided significant funding to embed and transform entrepreneurial teaching and practice into colleges of engineering (Matthew et al., 2017; Pistrui, Blessing & Mekemson, 2008; Smith et al. 2017). This activity combines with an added emphasis among engineering programs to develop an entrepreneurial mindset among their engineering students with the belief that this will lead to them being more productive and innovative whether their career path leads them into established industry (becoming “intrapreneurs”) or later as entrepreneurs. While this trend toward developing more entrepreneurially minded engineering students is supported by global economic trends and a rapidly changing work environment, one factor has been largely overlooked in this process. Statistically, most entrepreneurial ventures fail, with disproportionately large value being created from a minority of entrepreneurial endeavors (Coats, 2019). Given this fact, until we find ways to drastically increase the success rate of entrepreneurial ventures, as we increase engineering students’ exposure to entrepreneurship, we are also increasing their exposure to failure very early in their careers. With this exposure, it is unknown whether sufficient preparation and education around project/venture failure is occurring to properly equip entrepreneurially minded engineering students to learn and grow from entrepreneurial failure. In this work in progress study, current and former engineering students who formed entrepreneurial ventures and experienced either failure of the venture or significant failure during the venture are interviewed to better understand the influences that led to both adaptive and maladaptive responses to these failures. Participants have been selected from those that have received funding through the national VentureWell E-Team program. This program awards three levels of funding and provides mentorship, training, and networking for the teams. The study uses the framework developed by Henry, Shorter, Charkoudian, Heemstra, and Corwin (2018) in which they associate pre-failure dispositions related to fixed and growth mindset (Dweck, 2000, 2006) and mastery vs. performance disposition (Pintrich, 2000 a, b). Our work will utilize this framework to guide the research, but more importantly will provide a unique context for analysis, specifically within engineering entrepreneurship, which will add to the body of work and expand the understanding of this pre-failure/post-failure disposition framework. Initial interview data and analysis will be presented in the context of this framework with preliminary insights to be shared with those in the field.more » « less
-
Abstract A first‐generation college student is typically defined as a student whose biological parent(s) or guardian(s) never attended college or who started but did not finish college. However, “first‐generation” can represent diverse family education situations. The first‐generation student community is a multifaceted, and intersectional group of individuals who frequently lack educational/financial resources to succeed and, consequently, require supportive environments with rigorous mentorship. However, first‐generation students often do not make their identity as first‐generation students known to others due to several psychosocial and academic factors. Therefore, they are often “invisible minorities” in higher education. In this paper, we describe the diverse family situations of first‐generation students, further define “first‐generation,” and suggest five actions that first‐generation trainees at the undergraduate/graduate stages can engage in to succeed in an academic climate. We also provide suggestions for mentors to accommodate first‐generation students' unique experiences and equip them with tools to deliver intentional mentoring practices. We hope that this paper will help promote first‐generation student success throughout the academic pipeline.more » « less
-
This study examines the roots of entrepreneurial career goals among today’s U.S. undergraduate engineering students. Extensive literature exists on entrepreneurship education and on students’ career decision making, yet little work connects the two. To address this gap, we explore a sample of 5,819 undergraduate engineering students from a survey administered in 2015 to a nationally representative set of twenty-seven U.S. engineering schools. We identify how individual background measures, occupational learning experiences, and socio-cognitive measures such as self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations, and interest in innovation and entrepreneurship affect students’ entrepreneurial career focus. Based on career focus, the sample is split into “Starters” and “Joiners” where Starters are students who wish to start a new venture and Joiners are those who wish to join an existing venture. Results show the demographic, behavioral, and socio-cognitive characteristics of each group. Findings suggest that relative to Joiners, Starters have stronger occupational self-efficacy beliefs which are driven by higher interests in innovation-related activities and ascribing greater importance to involvement in innovation practices early in their careers. Additionally, the significant influence of particular learning experiences is discussed. These results have implications for engineering and entrepreneurship education. (This paper earned Best Research Paper Award, 3rd Place, in the ENT division.)more » « less
-
Students can have widely varying experiences while working on CS2 coding projects. Challenging experiences can lead to lower motivation and less success in completing these assignments. In this paper, we identify the common struggles CS2 students face while working on course projects and examine whether or not there is evidence of improvement in these areas of struggle between projects. While previous work has been conducted on understanding the importance of self-regulated learning to student success, it has not been fully investigated in the scope of CS2 coursework. We share our observations on investigating student struggles while working on coding projects through their self-reported response to a project reflection form. We apply emergent coding to identify student struggles at three points during the course and compare them against student actions in the course, such as project start times and office hours participation, to identify if students were overcoming these struggles. Through our coding and analysis we have found that while a majority of students encounter struggles with time management and debugging of failing tests, students tend to emphasize wanting to improve their time management skills in future coding assignments.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
