For over 20 years, Rose-Hulman has been working to integrate entrepreneurship into the curriculum and culture. While there have been lots of individual past successes, we now have the potential to make entrepreneurship a differentiating element of a Rose-Hulman education. Resources are in place to make this school one of the best places for innovators to pursue their educations in engineering, science and mathematics.

The strong Entrepreneurial culture at Rose-Hulman has motivated several students to work together and create an Entrepreneurship Club. The club helps innovative students with idea generation, intellectual property laws, customer research, and the art of salesmanship. The club also gives students access to a network of fellow entrepreneurs spanning industry, academia, and the student populations. Club activities include attending entrepreneurship conferences, hosting guest speakers, organizing business plan workshops, and assisting student create venture development groups. Contact student Ben Cook (cookbs@rose-hulman.edu) for more information.

We also have a number of courses that are specifically entrepreneurial. The undergraduate class entitled The Entrepreneur and its companion graduate version provide a foundation of concepts and the experience of writing a business plan. The Multidisciplinary Entrepreneurial Design Course was designed by a joint effort of several departments and funded by a grant from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA). This course has been taught by Drs. Bill Kline and Rob Bunch. In addition, electrical and computer engineering have been including an entrepreneurial element in their senior design capstone courses, and a number of teams have won NCIIA grants to pursue their prototypes. Other departments including mechanical engineering, civil engineering and applied biology and biomedical engineering have been encouraging innovative design, especially for applications that serve the less fortunate. The department also continues the practice of in-depth independent studies to produce real business plans that have helped students launch companies.

This is the seventh year that Rose-Hulman Ventures (RHV) has enabled students to work directly (for pay) on real innovative projects, a number of which are for small companies that depend on the quality of the RHV work for their business success. In the summer of 2006, over 80 students got entrepreneurial experience in their internships there.

We have enough supportive courses that we now offer entrepreneurship minors at both the undergraduate and M.S. levels. Information on these programs is on the engineering management web site at www.rose-hulman.edu/msem.

The most exciting news is the Kern Entrepreneurship and Engineering Network grant to foster entrepreneurship across the curriculum. This project is being carried out by a team led by Kern Fellow Dr. Patsy Brackin (ME). It will enhance our speaker series, develop more student club activities, provide workshops and generate course modules for everything from engineering to humanities courses. The goal is to repeatedly reinforce entrepreneurial mindsets!