Board 296: Fostering Leaders in Technology Entrepreneurship (FLiTE): Program Goals and First-Year Activities.

The NSF S-STEM funded program titled Fostering Leaders in Technology Entrepreneurship (FLiTE) at Western Carolina University seeks to cultivate entrepreneurial thinking in engineering and engineering technology students with the goal of creating graduates who bring impactful contributions to industry through the generation of creative technology ideas and new businesses. Over its planned six-year duration, this project will fund scholarships to thirty-six unique full-time students with financial need who are pursuing bachelor's degrees in engineering or engineering technology. The project aims to cultivate skills in entrepreneurial thinking among undergraduates in engineering and engineering technology by involving a cohort of students across academic years in an intensive learning community and bringing their technologyoriented product ideas from concept to market. Scholarship recipients will be linked through cohort teaming sessions with campus resources, local industry partners and experts, and faculty mentors, to propose, critique, select, develop, and implement commercially viable technology products. The novel approach to engineering education developed through this project will serve to enrich the creative potential of new graduates in technical fields and expand small business creation and employment, both of importance to growth regions where there may be fewer large corporate employers. Key dimensions of those who exhibit entrepreneurial thinking include a growth mindset, a regular practice of creativity, and high personal self-efficacy. With entrepreneurism seen as an enabling force to overcome employment and income divides between urban and rural job markets, dimensions of entrepreneurship that may be taught are of high interest. The project will investigate the impacts of the learning community on the learned dimensions of the entrepreneurial mindset and will examine the effects of program interventions on entrepreneurism in scholarship recipients as compared with other students in the host department. This paper will outline activities from the inaugural year of the program including scholar recruitment and demographics, cohort meeting activities and dynamics, invited speaker topics, scholar perceptions of the program to date, and perceptions of their own aptitudes for entrepreneurial thinking. Findings from these activities may inform the prospective structure of similar entrepreneurship programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]