With a $3 million seed funding just awarded from the Kauffman Foundation, Carnegie Mellon University is launching a major $18 million initiative to incorporate entrepreneurship and innovation management throughout the undergraduate curriculum.
The goal? To foster the teaching of entrepreneurship throughout the entire university to enable students to be entrepreneurial, to think entrepreneurially and creatively, says Steven Klepper, who was named the director of the new Institute for the Study of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technological Change. The institute will manage the initiative and be the hub for education and research.
Carnegie Mellon was one of a select number of universities to receive the grant which is part of a $200 million effort to transform the way entrepreneurship education is taught in the nation's colleges.A recent report by the Conference Board reported that two-thirds of the world's top executives plan to incorporate innovation into their business models to drive growth.
“The employee of the future will be expected to be innovative and entrepreneurial,” says Klepper, the Hamerschlag Professor of Economics and Social Science. “We need to give our students a competitive edge. It will come in this kind of training in innovation and entrepreneurship” A new six-class minor called Innovation Entrepreneurship and Economic Development will be available to all undergrads staring in 2007 with classes ranging from Technology and Economic Growth to Rise of the Asian Economies.
“The second part of this new minor is that we promised financial inducements to get faculty to teach new classes that combine entrepreneurship and innovation with their disciplines,” says Klepper. In addition a new master’s program in engineering—Engineering Technology Innovation and Management—will be introduced. --TC
Source: Steven Klepper, Carnegie Mellon University
Photograph copyright © Jonathan Greene