Engineering and entrepreneurship a fruitful match in business

Engineers are problem-solvers. And so are entrepreneurs.

In both disciplines, professionals look for solutions. Engineers seek ways to make things stronger, more powerful or more efficient. Entrepreneurs see needs that can be filled with new products or services. In either case, creativity and innovation are used to address problems, and society receives the benefit.

Just imagine what can happen when the two disciplines come together.

That’s why the University of Missouri-Columbia College of Engineering has positioned entrepreneurship as a major strategic goal among our faculty and students. We believe that the combination of engineering know-how and entrepreneurial skills will make our faculty more effective, our students more marketable and our state and nation more competitive in the face of the changing global economy.

Our nation is facing a severe shortage of engineers. While MU’s engineering enrollment remains fairly steady, the demand for engineers is growing exponentially. We are not putting enough engineers into the pipeline to ensure that we as a nation can address our growing technological challenges, particularly upon the retirement of the existing cadre of professional engineers.

This year in our nation, 70,000 engineers will graduate from institutions of higher education. In China, 600,000 will graduate, and India is not far behind. We will soon find ourselves in a global struggle for technological supremacy that our economy cannot afford to lose.

In the College of Engineer-ing, we want to emphasize to prospective and current students that engineers have options to work in industry or in government, but they also have the option to make their own work opportunities through the creation of entrepreneurial ventures to address a wide variety of public- and private-sector needs. Even within large industry, there are opportunities to think entrepreneurially to create new products, technologies and innovations to fill gaps in research and commercialization. Our primary goal is to provide the training that supports an entrepreneurial mindset to complement the fine technical qualifications with which our students are prepared.

In his book, The Entrepreneurial Imperative, Carl J. Schramm, CEO of the Kauffman Foundation (the leader in entrepreneurial education and research) states, “Nearly 85 percent of all the high-growth businesses created in the last 25 years have been established by people with a college degree. Of these, engineering was the predominant major.”

Seeing this potential, we invited the MU Extension business-development programs into our college in 2005. The University Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship is located in the College of Engineering’s Lafferre Hall on the MU campus. There our faculty and students work daily with business-development and product-commercialization counselors to find government-funded research opportunities and to gain the understanding they need to start companies and take products to market.

Our students are bright, committed and energetic. As members of the “Millennial” or “Y” generation, they are expected to create more entrepreneurial enterprises than any previous population cohort in the history of our nation. We need to equip them with both the technical and the business-development skills they need to succeed.

Engineering entrepreneurship is a growing field, and MU is at the forefront of this vitally important movement. We never know when inspiration will strike a student. But we don’t want to leave it to chance. Our mission is to prepare them—by classroom and laboratory education and by entrepreneurial experience.

We are up to the challenge.