Fostering future engineers as transformational agents: integrating sustainability and entrepreneurship in engineering education

Abstract

Engineering plays a pivotal role in tackling the grand societal challenges humanity is facing. It is essential that engineers understand these challenges and realize the impact their solutions have. This means that higher education's task in fostering future engineers as transformation agents is key. In this paper we introduce initial arguments about why engineering programs need to include both sustainability and entrepreneurship as core elements for students to obtain a holistic approach towards humanity's grand societal challenges, along with specific skills, including for example critical thinking and reflection, systemic thinking, building partnerships, and collaborations An overview of the literature shows that independent sustainability and entrepreneurship have been recognized as important for engineering programs, even though the integration of both has yet to be achieved. Furthermore, a first analysis of a sample of engineering programs in Germany confirms what we observed in the literature. It would appear that the time for a transformation of engineering programs has arrived.

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