As each student slowly walked into the classroom yesterday, and sat down, I had a smile on my face. Each one of the 25 students in my class represented a young mind that was ready with a strong desire to learn, and hopefully add a touch of their personal experience and creativity to the world. Unlike most of the other courses on campus, mine is not a required course, it’s also filled with primarily seniors, which of course means that each student is there by choice and I have a pretty mature mind in front of me. Whether they realize it or not, the choice they are making each time they come to ECE 490L is to learn something that will help them as they begin their entrepreneurial journey.
I was approached by two of my professors at Duke University last fall to come in and teach a course to the undergraduates. My professors desire was to spark more entrepreneurial thought at Pratt, Duke’s engineering school. While the course is meant to primarily be for those who are Electrical and Computer Engineering majors, I decided to allow any student who expressed an interest in building a tech product or tech-enabled business to join. Part of my reasoning is because I truly believe that the best products aren’t just brought to life by engineers. Liberal arts students are also creative people, and while they might not have the skills to build, they are capable of communicating their ideas and vision to the process. Plus, having began my own college career as an Economics major and then discovering that I was a builder, I know there maybe others like me out there interested in engineering entrepreneurship.
Since registration earlier this year, I’ve been asking myself hundreds of questions such as: “What’s important to a young entrepreneur? How do you productize an idea? How do you form a company?” Then yesterday during class it dawned on me that this course isn’t about me. It’s about the needs of the students. They are my customers and the only way I’ll know how to service them is by understanding their needs. So towards the end of my lecture I started to ask questions. The first question I asked was, “How many of you in here have an idea?” I had 6 students respond with varying degrees of enthusiasm and confidence and at various stages of building a product. The first steps of engineering entrepreneurship.
There were two common themes I noticed amongst this group, which I find prevalent amongst most first time entrepreneurs. The first is that they are unsure how to communicate their idea in a way that would spark interest in others. The second is that they didn’t share the story of why they chose this idea, their personal interest in it.
The second is important for longevity of interest in an idea plus the unique experiences that only they have, which will eventually differentiate their idea from countless ones just like it. The second is also important to resolve the first; in inspire others you yourself need to be inspired.
In my next class, which is about group brainstorming I’ll be sure to address both of these points.
Then I turned my attention to the larger group of students that didn’t have ideas. Some would tell me to just hand them an idea, but that’s not the approach I want to take. While that would make my life easier, it would be robbing them from a valuable learning experience. So I realized that I needed to spark some creativity into their souls.
There are those who will challenge me and say that creativity cannot be taught, but that’s like saying you cannot teach someone to be a storyteller, you can. You start by giving them concrete examples, then dissect the overall structure, provide them a process for creating the structure, and then trace the plot and theme back to it’s origins. So while you cannot “create a story” for someone, and it has to come from within them, you can teach them how to create one, and where and how they might find their inspiration. The key is to teach the process.
Likewise my goal is to show my students that they have creativity within them. To that end, I need to inspire confidence in each of them, and gently nudge them to explore their interests and passions. Then to take those interests and passions and teach my students how to transform them through a process into an idea and from there possibly into a product.
I no doubt believe it will be a challenging and fun semester for both my students and myself!
