The New Venture Design Experience - How UPRM made business and engineering students collaborate in entrepreneurial projects by pairing existing courses

Oct 15, 2026

Students are drawn to innovation and entrepreneurship, yet taking I&E courses is difficult because their curricula are already demanding. This paper presents the New Venture Design Experience, a one-year interdisciplinary program pairing core and elective courses across Engineering and Business Administration. Teams run through Design Thinking or Consumer Behavior, then advance in Product Design, Capstone, or Technology-Based Entrepreneurship to build prototypes, create crowdfunding pitches, and compete.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages10

Reading Time25 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Entrepreneurship education growth and teaching shift

Case study context: UPRM and Babson College perspective

Program design: course pairing and student teams

Outcomes and student impact

| | Ad | vances in Engineering Edu | cation | | | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | SPRING 2020 The New Venture Design Experience: How UPRM made business and engineering students collaborate in entrepreneurial projects by pairing existing courses MARI LUZ ZAPATA-RAMOS AND JOSÉ E. LUGO University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez Campus ABSTRACT Students are attracted to innovation and entrepreneurship. However, it is challenging for them to take courses in I&E due to their already busy curriculums. This paper describes the New Venture Design Experience, a one-year interdisciplinary program that pairs core and elective courses between the colleges of Engineering and Business Administration. The program aims to provide the time and resources for students to venture into their own entrepreneurial projects during a one year period, within the classroom setting. Students will first take either Design Thinking, a course that teaches human-centered design with a project-based learning approach; or Consumer Behavior, a course that teaches students about the different factors that influence consumer behavior and the decision process. Each team has members in both courses, which continue working together throughout the year. In the second semester, team members work on their ventures through the Product Design, Capstone, or Technology-Based Entrepreneurship courses. By the end of the program, they will have developed a working prototype, created a crowdfunding pitch, and submitted to an entrepreneurial competition. This leads teams to start impacting society in a positive manner by providing solutions to real-life problems. Key words: Interdisciplinary, Innovation, Entrepreneurship INTRODUCTION Entrepreneurship education has been in constant growth in the past years in Europe, USA and Latin America (Bernstein & Carayannis, 2012; Castellani & Lora, 2014; Storen, 2014) due to the multiple SPRING 2020 1 ADVANCES IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION The New Venture Design Experience: How UPRM made business and engineering students collaborate in entrepreneurial projects by pairing existing courses benefits it provides (Storen, 2014) . Some of these include: promoting entrepreneurial and innovative orientations which promote starting a business, increased confidence and initiative in students (Storen, 2014), improved attitudes, skills, and abilities in students (Zabihi & Moghaddasi, 2006), economic growth (Rubach, Bradley, & Kluck, 2015), and creation of employment (Castellani & Lora, 2014) . With the growth of entrepreneurship education has come a shift in methods of teaching it, moving from conventional methods to active learning or action-based (Esmi, Marzoughi, & Torkzadeh, 2015) . This goes in accordance to Babson College’s philosophy that states that to teach entrepreneurship, alternative techniques must be employed rather than the traditional lecture-style course. This is because entrepreneurship positions students to “create, apply, and act” (Greene, 2017, ¶4) . Some complementary techniques used to teach entrepreneurship are (1) starting businesses as part of the coursework,(2) serious games and simulations,(3) design-based learning, and (4) reflective practice – where students develop knowledge from experience (Greene, 2017) . Babson College defines entrepreneurship as an applied science (Simon, 1996), “a process of identifying an opportunity, understanding resource requirements, acquiring resources, planning, and implementing (Greene, 2017, ¶1) .” Therefore, through this case study, we will be describing how the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus (UPRM) has sought to teach entrepreneurship following Babson College’s perspective. The New Venture Design Experience (NVDE), an interdisciplinary initiative at UPRM, incorporates design-based learning into the existing course curriculum.“Design is a process of divergence and convergence requiring skills in observation, synthesis

FAQs

What problem does the New Venture Design Experience address?

It addresses the difficulty students face in taking innovation and entrepreneurship courses due to already heavy curricula.

How does the program structure student collaboration across disciplines?

Students pair core and elective courses between Engineering and Business Administration, forming teams with members in both courses that work together throughout the year.

What outputs do teams produce by the end of the program?

Teams develop a working prototype, create a crowdfunding pitch, and submit to an entrepreneurial competition.

Oct 15, 2026

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