INTEGRATION OF CDIO STANDARDS TO ENHANCE STUDENT’S ENTREPRENEURIAL SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE

Abstract

Engineering education in recent years has shifted its original focus on technical knowledge and engineering skills to more on communication and entrepreneurial skills. The emphasis on entrepreneurship is especially relevant given many success stories on EE and IT start-ups ever since the late 1990s, which indicate that an engineer nowadays require a wide variety of skills and knowledge to survive the rapid and constant changes of technology to become successful. Harsh reality has shown that engineers, who fail to move up to management positions or to start their own business by the age of 35, will be easily replaced by younger generations of engineers. Successful entrepreneurship, however, requires many things besides a good opportunity, of which creativity, flexibility, and practicability are also essential and more importantly, they can be taught. This study based on observation and interviews, followed the path of actual work and incremental progress in a student’s entrepreneurship project to determine important “ingredients” in the engineering education of successful entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurship project of our focus here is the Robohand project (by Duy Tan University staff and students), which strives to provide robotic hands to people who lost their arms and/or hands at birth or due to some peace-time or war-time accidents. The study found out that not only one or two or three, but a series of CDIO standards are simultaneously needed in a systematic and integrated curriculum so as to create well-rounded graduates with strong engineering and entrepreneurial skills. Those can be identified as CDIO Standards No. 1, 2,3, 5, 7 and 8, which respectively help students identify urgent socio-economic problems, integrate different skills and know-how for feasible solutions, select the optimal solution based on strong design and implementation knowledge, and continuously improve on the solution outcomes and designs by following certain technical, social and ethical requirements. Details of this paper, as a result, will be of benefit to universities and colleges, which are looking for ways to improve on their students’ entrepreneurial skills and knowledge.