COURSE DESCRIPTION

The Invention, Innovation & Entrepreneurship course is offered as part of AAFIE’s Global Competence Program, an international initiative with a series of courses that uses world class senior professionals from the United States to prepare students to become international engineers.

The Invention, Innovation & Entrepreneurship is taught by a group of inventors, senior engineers, and entrepreneurs from U.S. multinational companies. The goal of the course is to cultivate 21st century engineers in obtaining key skills for solving challenging engineering problems and designing innovative products in a global context.

COURSE OBJECTIVES

Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to:

  • Understand concepts of global invention, innovation, commercialization, and entrepreneurship;
  • Understand how global culture, society, and sustainability affect innovation;
  • Understand global engineering innovation and product development process
  • Understand global innovation models;
  • Understand popular innovation tools such as brainstorm as well as systematic innovation approaches such as SCAMPER and TRIZ, and their applications in solving real world global engineering problems and designing new products
  • Propose a reasonably innovative solution to solve a real world problem and meet customer needs and global constraints;
  • Understand popular global engineering tools such as Solidworks and Arduino;
  • Understand how invention and innovation principles are used in real-world global engineering;
  • Teamwork and communicate effectively;
  • Understand the roles of international patents, intellectual property, and venture capital in international entrepreneurship;
  • Gain more enthusiasm for becoming an inventor and entrepreneur.

In the class, students will interact with inventors and entrepreneurs from the United States, and work with the international senior engineers to create engineering solutions for solving real world engineering problems.

PREREQUISITES 

Students are required to have basic understanding of engineering before taking the course.

INSTRUCTORS

The course is taught by AAFIE Global Engineering Lecturers Group, a group of senior professionals from U.S. multi-national companies.

METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

By leveraging the world’s most advanced Internet video collaboration technology, the world-class professionals and senior engineers from the United States give real-time lectures to students, interact with the students, and guide the students in conducting international engineering projects.

Students will complete the entire coursework in the Gloer learning community, a platform specifically designed to promote global perspective, cross-cultural communication, international collaboration, and critical and creative thinking skills. In the Gloer learning community, students are guided by international mentors consisting of international senior engineers from multinational companies in the United States. Students submit their coursework to the global community,

present their solutions to the global community, receive feedback from the global community, and complete projects with the global community, making students learn in a real global context.

TEXTBOOKS

The course is mostly about real-world international engineering experience, therefore, there are no textbooks, but students are required to read and research prior to class sessions. Students will leverage Internet contents for project assignments and use live recordings for class review.

COURSE COMPONENTS:

To complete the course, a total of 64 sessions is required for lectures and student projects. The course is divided into two segments in each week: 

  • Mindsets in Invention, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Student deliverable: quiz & classroom discussion)
  • Project (Student deliverable: engineering documents)

COURSE GRADING POLICY

Classroom Participations/Responses: 20%

Project: 50%

Final Exam: 30%

Attendance is mandatory for all class sessions. Students are subject to losing points for absences unless prior approval is obtained from Instructors or Teaching Assistants. Students receiving excused absences are required to watch the class recordings online as well as to fulfill any/all course requirements associated with missed class sessions.

COURSE CREDITS

The recommended number of credits for the course is 3 – 4, depending on the final deliverables. If the final deliverable is a working prototype (for senior students), the credit is 4. Otherwise 3. To complete the course, a total of 48 - 64 sessions is required. Students will meet 1 - 2 times a week with the instructors, each meeting contains 2 sessions (45 minutes/session).