Walter Hurley
Animal Sciences, College of Agricultural, Consumer & Environmental Sciences
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Building Entrepreneurial Skills through Advanced Science Instruction
This project will seek to integrate entrepreneurial skill development into an advanced undergraduate science course, and to systematically monitor and document student development. The research will analyze the impact of the course on student learning about their entrepreneurial skills, and document the course model as a resource for other science courses and curricula seeking to expand student learning of these skills. The course emphasis will be on encouraging student innovation, creativity, and opportunity seeking through the inquiry process. Students will be asked to consider how real-world scientific challenges, and their own experiences with those issues, relate to the field of study, and in turn how that field can respond to these issues. Through this process students will be asked to recognize and explicitly document the opportunity, their creative thinking process, how they would manage innovation, and how they expect to articulate and sell their ideas. The documentation component will be one set of data for monitoring and documenting the course. Helping students understand this type of inquiry-based creative process will equip them with the fundamental tools associated with opportunity recognition, entrepreneurial cognition, and innovation. Skills are durable while content knowledge is often transitory. This research will address entrepreneurship as a life skill, related to strategic thinking, independence and self-sufficiency, which can be learned through the study of content.
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