Integrating Business Concepts and Entrepreneurship into an Undergraduate Engineering Curriculum Using Case Studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The University of Waterloo, located at the heart of Canada's Technology Triangle, has a national reputation as the most innovative University in Canada, largely as a result of the success of its co-operative education program and its management of intellectual property. The University lays no claim to intellectual property generated by faculty, thus encouraging innovation. Waterloo started the first Canadian co-operative education program, engineering is 100% co-op, all programs offer a co-operative education option, and as a result Waterloo has one of the largest co-operative education programs in the world. Most engineering departments have a strong but conventional engineering curriculum, focussed on engineering science with a sprinkling of engineering design. All engineering programs require at least one course in engineering economics, and there are innovative programs to support students who have an entrepreneurial vision: a residence dedicated to students who wish to develop entrepreneurial ideas (VeloCity), a Master of Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology (MBET) program, and Enterprise Co-op for students who wish to spend a work term starting their own business. However, more can be done to provide a business foundation for all students, and to motivate some students to develop their vision, to promote creativity, and to provide them with the necessary skills to realise their vision. Engineering design cases are a tool to allow students to see the complexity of engineering practice, to gain experience and develop the skills to deal with this complexity, and to make connections between various topics in their undergraduate curriculum. They are an ideal mechanism to emphasize the importance of business issues in engineering design, and to promote the creative solutions to problems. To be effective, students must be exposed to a wide range of cases, covering a wide range of concepts, in a wide range of contexts. This requires a sustainable supply of diverse cases. The Waterloo Cases in Design Engineering (WCDE) group at Waterloo has been established to generate engineering design case studies, primarily from our own students’ experiences on co-op work terms, and has recently begun generating these cases at a minimum rate of 30 per year. This offers a unique opportunity to implement these cases pervasively throughout the curriculum. WCDE cases range from very analytical to highly creative, and the context varies from large multinational corporations to start-ups. Since the cases are derived from our own student experiences, they are inherently motivating. Results to date will be summarized, with a focus on building an appreciation of the business context for engineering design using cases which demonstrate engineering science concepts, and promoting creativity in engineering design.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".