Teaching sustainable entrepreneurship to engineering students: the case of Delft University of Technology

Abstract

Sustainability, enhancement of personal skills, social aspects of technology, management and entrepreneurship are of increasing concern for engineers and therefore for engineering education. In 1996 at Delft University of Technology this led to the introduction of a subject on sustainable entrepreneurship and technology in the course programmes of Chemical Engineering and Materials Sciences Engineering. This subject combines lectures, project work in which a business plan is written, sustainability and presentation training. This paper shows that it has been possible to combine entrepreneurship, sustainability and project education successfully in a subject for undergraduate engineering students and describes background, assumptions, outline, results and recent adjustments of this subject. It includes a discussion on how to integrate sustainability and entrepreneurship in terms of triple P (People, Profit, Planet) and how to incorporate it pragmatically in the key elements of a business plan: (1) business idea, mission and strategy; (2) context, stakeholder and market analysis; (3) marketing; (4) production; (5) organisation and management; (6) finance and reporting. Attention is paid to results regarding the business plan, spin-off like start-ups and also to the learning results of both students and lecturers. It ends drawing some lessons derived from the subject’s results and the learning experiences of both students and lecturers.

Keywords:

• Engineering education
• Sustainable entrepreneurship
• Skills
• Project education

Acknowledgements

The authors greatly appreciate the help of the following persons without whom we would never have been able to develop and run this subject. Jan Koolhaas and Karel Mulder helped creating the subject and co-running it the first years. Pieter van Mourik for giving the idea to combine business and sustainability. Theo Luyendijk for giving us insight in the way of thinking of materials scientists. Remke Bras-Klapwijk for writing the original chapter on sustainable entrepreneurship and Bob van der Laaken for the English language check. Wouter Hofman, Arjan Minnigh, Sjoerd Romkes, Joost Paques and Marjan Bassa who were student-assistants. The account managers and the direction of the local branch of the RABO bank for their willingness to discuss the plans with the students. Last but not least, all lecturers that have been involved in giving presentation training.

Notes

^†Since the recent shift to the BSc-MSc system in higher education in the Netherlands, the third year is the last year of the BSc programmes.

^‡This is the Royal Netherlands Chemical Society; its Dutch abbreviation is KNCV.

^†This is also reflected in the background and affiliation of the authors. Next to chemical engineers, the subject involves lecturers from the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management including technology assessment, entrepreneurship, communication training and an entrepreneur.

^†In Dutch the term for sustainable is ‘duurzaam’, while ‘duurzaam’ in the sense of business refers also to continuity (of a company) and to durability (of a product).

^†This includes methods and tools for environment-related financial management on the level of the firm, for life-cycle costing for products (on the level of chains) and for societal costs and benefits. The latter deals on the level of society with the generation, analysis and use of monetised estimates of environmental damage (and benefits) created by the activities of an organisation, site or project and takes into account for instance cleaning costs after ending operations.

^‡The subject was not conceived to get students starting their own business (although a couple of them did). The aim was to make them aware of the role of entrepreneurs in businesses and their own skills and interest in entrepreneurship.

^†This can be illustrated by the marketing description of a product. Engineering students tend to describe products in terms of technical features and functionalities, while students in business and marketing describe products as bundles of benefits for customers or consumers.