Global Innovation Initiative Brings Entrepreneurship and Business Into Engineering Capstone Experience

For many engineering students, senior design projects, capstones or master’s theses are a final opportunity to put years of technical coursework into practice. But at NYU Tandon, a new initiative is asking students to take one more step: to think beyond whether something can be built and consider whether it should be built, who might use it and what it would take to bring it into the world.

That is the premise behind the Global Innovation Initiative, a school-wide effort launched in January to give students across departments a broader understanding of innovation and entrepreneurship alongside their technical education. Led by faculty in Tandon’s Technology Management and Innovation Department and the NYU Leslie Entrepreneurial Institute, the initiative brings business skills into students’ existing educational experiences.

“The idea is that future engineers need to have knowledge not just of engineering, but other important considerations like customers, products, and markets,” says Oded Nov, Professor of Technology Management and Innovation who leads the initiative. “The bigger context of the ecosystem technology lives in is an essential part of an engineering education”

One of the initiative’s first projects has been to bring that perspective directly into engineering courses. The program partnered with three departments to deliver modules for students in their final-year projects. Rather than creating a separate entrepreneurship course, the sessions were designed to integrate entrepreneurial thinking into the student-led projects themselves.

A student designing a chip, for example, might traditionally concentrate on whether the technology works. Through the initiative, that student is also encouraged to ask who needs the chip, who the customers are, what they might pay and how the team should organize itself.

That distinction became tangible for Noah Rivera, a recent Electrical and Computer Engineering graduate who participated in the initiative as part of his senior design experience.

Rivera and three classmates wanted to do something different from what they saw as the conventional senior design project. Rather than viewing their project as an assignment constrained by the requirements of their major, their group instead decided to build something they were genuinely excited about: a Roblox video game called The Gifted, combining software development with an FPGA-based hardware controller.

The project required the team to draw on a wide range of skills. They developed the game in Roblox Studio, programmed the FPGA controller using SystemVerilog and created models for the game environment. Rivera also served as team leader, coordinating the group's work.

What began as a class project has since taken on a life of its own. The team presented a working demo and controller at the capstone competition and continued developing the game after the semester ended. They eventually released a beta version and began promoting it, including creating a LinkedIn presence and working with streamers who played the game.

For Rivera, the entrepreneurial workshops complemented that experience by giving him tools for thinking about the project as more than a technical exercise.

The sessions were “very interactive,” he recalled, and covered what makes a startup successful, management, and the organizational challenges involved in developing a project. Students also worked with practical tools such as storyboards and milestone trackers.

Those lessons became useful beyond the classroom. Rivera said his team continued to use some of the project-management practices after the senior design course ended. The experience also helped him explore an entrepreneurial path he had already been interested in pursuing.

The FPGA controller illustrates another goal of the initiative: encouraging students to see their technical knowledge in a different context. Rivera's team noticed that hardware used in engineering classes could sometimes feel abstract. Their project gave the technology a purpose outside the classroom.

“We really want to get that point across to students who may not like working with an FPGA,” Rivera said, describing the team's desire to show that the technology could be used for something entertaining and unexpected, rather than being limited by the scope of the curriculum. "This is another reason why I believe our project stands out from the rest."

The Global Innovation Initiative is explicitly school-wide rather than limited to the Technology Management and Innovation Department, with the goal of incorporating innovation and entrepreneurship into activities both inside and outside the classroom.

“This year’s capstone effort reached roughly 70 students across the three participating departments.” says Aric Meyer, Deputy Director of the Initiative. “The plan is eventually to expand the model to additional departments and courses.”

For students such as Rivera, the value is not necessarily in transforming an engineering project into a startup. His team’s game may or may not ultimately become a business. What the experience has provided is a different way of thinking about the possibilities of an engineering education. A technical idea does not have to end when a course ends. With the right tools, a senior project can become a prototype, a product, a venture or simply the starting point for a student's next idea.

For Nov and his colleagues Tom Mazzone and Jabril Bensiderine, that means expanding the definition of what it means to educate an engineer. Technical expertise remains essential, but it is only one part of the equation. Engineers also need to understand the people and systems that surround their inventions.