A Cross-Discipline Technopreneurship Course: Student Perceived Benefits and Considerations

This innovative practice full paper describes the development and implementation of a cross-discipline techno-preneurship course, highlighting best practice, the benefits of the course perceived by students and further considerations. The course is offered at a large prestigious UK university in a department where electronic, electrical engineering and computer science courses are taught, and is mandatory for the electrical and electronic engineering students and elective for computer engineering students, who are in their third year of study as part of combined bachelor's and master's degree programs. It emphasizes teamwork, problem identification, problem solving, and creativity. This course uniquely integrates engineering skills with entrepreneurship, using a project-based learning approach requiring students to work in teams to develop a pitch, business plan, technical feasibility study, and a working prototype. These have been shown to be the most predominant methods to assess technopreneurship courses. However, the course is set apart by the focus on real-world world problems and fostering connections between students and the local start-up ecosystem. A key strength of the course is to improve students professional skills, which has been shown to be desired by employers in industry. In this work, we outline the course structure, intended learning outcomes, assessment, schedule of teaching, and present findings gained from teaching the course. Therefore, it is easily replicable by other practitioners. We detail how this builds upon previous practices to further the aims of the course to increase links with the local start-up ecosystem and improve students professional skills. The results of an online questionnaire proposed by the University optionally completed by students at the end of the course in the 2022/23 and 2023/24 academic years, revealed that students do perceive the benefit of the course as a way to develop their professional skills, such as public speaking, teamwork, and writing skills. Furthermore, the students appreciated the course structure and felt well-informed about the assessment. The results also revealed that the students rated the course highly for overall quality. The work produced by the teams confirmed our hypothesis that the hardware and/or software nature of their prototype/product appears to be disconnected from the makeup of students from the two different program backgrounds enrolled on the course. For instance, a team of only electronic engineering students still had a highly important software component that was vital for their final product. However, even more interestingly, the success of each team would appear to be based upon the team dynamics, which was monitored by the academic instructor in chard of the course throughout the entirety of the course and was a part of the assessment. Teams that demonstrated good levels of teamwork, overall tended to do better in the course than teams, which did not.