Introducing a Business Acumen into an Engineering Curriculum

The Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department at the Western New England University began an effort to integrate business acumen into the ECE curriculum. The effort started in academic year 2011 - 2012 with two required lab-based ECE courses and one lecture-based design elective course. For academic year 2012 - 2013 the effort has been expanded to include four additional lecture-based courses. Students enrolled in the Junior EE Lab sequence, EE Lab I (EE 319) and EE Lab IIa (EE 323), are required to develop a budget for each lab experiment. The budget is an estimate on the costs associated with performing the lab experiment. Students are given table that lists various costs such labor rates, use of the lab space, and an overhead rate. The creation of the budget is a pre-lab task. A post-lab task that is included in the lab report a cost report. The cost report details the actual cost of performing the experiment and comparing the actual costs with the predicted costs. The lecture-based courses all have at least one design project. Modifications were made to the current design project to include the components that would typically be found in a business setting (for example, cost proposals). Students are required to bid on the project. Students must submit a final report which includes the cost report - including an analysis of the bid cost versus the actual cost. The professor assumes a variety of roles for the projects such as customer, VP of Engineering, and Senior Engineer. The paper will discuss the learning objectives, the outcomes, and the assessment process. This project is sponsored in part by a grant from the Kern Entrepreneurship Education Network (KEEN).