In the spirit of cooperation between Tennessee public and private universities, Tennessee Tech and Vanderbilt University are helping students prepare to face today’s world of corporate buyouts, layoffs, greed and unethical practices with entrepreneurial skills and attitude.

Through the Entrepreneurs in Action program, our College of Engineering and Vanderbilt’s Entrepreneurship Education Forum are collaborating to research and develop an online environment where students can learn how to create viable businesses based on real-world case studies. The program presents students with problem-based projects, where students face questions about the social, economic, political, environmental and engineering policy issues related to each case.

“Although the forum provides lessons for students across disciplines, we are particularly interested in giving engineering students an opportunity to think like entrepreneurs and to immediately see applications of their engineering studies with real-world problems and business ventures,” says Glen Johnson, dean of our College of Engineering.

Current projects under consideration include a study of the recent electrical blackout affecting the eastern United States, as well as a study of ultra wideband wireless and battery technologies.

Wilburn Clouse, project director at Vanderbilt, says the objective is to create a broad-based, cross-discipline approach with an emphasis on teaching students to see opportunities that others miss and to stress self-employment and self-fulfillment.

“The general theme is to create a job, not take a job,” he says.

In early experimental studies over the past five years, Entrepreneurs in Action has developed sites in New York, New Mexico, Louisiana and Tennessee. The new TTU-Vanderbilt partnership marks the first application of the program in a university setting. Ken Currie, director of our Center for Manufacturing Research, says he sees mutual benefits to students at both universities.

“The cross-disciplinary approach with Vanderbilt’s Human and Organizational Development program will greatly enhance our engineering students’ education, and Vanderbilt’s students will gain a better understanding of the social, political, environmental and economic applications of engineering ventures,” says Currie.

Supported by a National Science Foundation grant to Tennessee Tech to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship in engineering and related disciplines, the project is funded to Vanderbilt through a sub-contract. Johnson serves as the grant’s principal investigator.

“We hope to go online with these cross-disciplinary learning modules in Fall 2004,” says Clouse. “We plan to further develop the interdisciplinary nature of our work by adding selected classes from other schools and universities across the nation.”

The Entrepreneurs in Action program also interfaces with local small businesses, including TechWerks, a Cookeville-based technology company that specializes in the identification and solution of technical problems in companies and organizations.

As part of the TTU research project, TechWerks is investigating new solutions to prescription drug distribution and accuracy. Application of such technology may have a profound impact on prescription drug dispensing and could affect programs such as Veterans’ Administration mail-order pharmacies and TennCare. TechWerks will work collaboratively with and serve as online experts for Entrepreneurs in Action.

For more information about the Entrepreneurship Education Forum and related information about current research, contact Johnson at gjohnson or 3172 or Clouse at wil.clouse@vanderbilt.edu or 615-322-8059. The forum web site is located at entrepreneurship.vanderbilt.edu.