The Brazilian Engineering Education Reform Program, launched this year, challenges universities to undertake needed changes in engineering education, in order to adapt it to the new realities of the post-industrial society. The Center for Sciences and Technology (CTC) of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) responded by introducing a new vision and corresponding curriculum innovations in both its undergraduate and graduate courses. The present paper focuses on the changes currently under way in the undergraduate courses, the object of which is to develop the Entrepreneurial Engineer: a professional able to develop market opportunities of a technical nature, whether in large industrial structures or in small (technological) firms.
The original and innovative academic structure of the CTC has proved its usefulness over the past 30 years. It includes five traditional engineering departments (Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, Industrial, and Materials Engineering) and four basic sciences departments (Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry and Computer Science). These departments cooperate in several ways, particularly in the freshman and sophomore years - the core curriculum common to both engineering and science students - in which the courses taught by the basic sciences departments are increasingly designed to meet requirements set by the engineering departments.
The close horizontal integration between the departments, which adds diversity to the training of engineers, is amplified by the vertical integration between undergraduate and graduate activities. The latter reinforces the significance of research in the educational process.
In addition to these internal connections, engineering education at PUC-Rio is being transformed by the growing focus on external connections, particularly with the business sector. This adds focus and market sensitivity to both research and teaching.
The main modifications are as follows:
The paper concludes with a discussion of the difficulties found in the implementation of these changes, and stresses the importance of reviewing traditional forms of rewarding faculty adopted in research-centered universities, which tend to undervalue the teaching function.
Changes in graduate courses, involving the creation of interdisciplinary master courses tailored to the needs of the productive sectors, will be the subject of another paper.
The Center for Science and Technology (CTC) of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro - (PUC-Rio) has a history of more than 30 years of educational and research activities, including some important contributions to engineering education in the Brazilian university system. The CTC is an academic center with a strong departmental structure that ensures, nonetheless, an even balance between integration and differentiation. The natural tendency for differentiation has been partly balanced by:
The socioeconomic and political factors that prevailed during the first three decades of the CTC's history have changed in very significant ways, as we are all well aware. The shift from a closed to an open economy has brought about what may be viewed as surprising developments. At first, one might expect a closed economy to tend to focus universities' attention more keenly on domestic problems and opportunities. In fact, it tended to make the university center on itself and the academic world. Our planning discussions on the type of opportunities being opened by new realities suggested a need for a broad revision of the profile of engineering professionals and their training. The results of this discussion will be presented in the next section.
The new economic and political paradigms of competitive insertion in the global economy is reshaping the university's relationship with its external environment. This has implications for its educational vision and mission. New questions are being asked about all aspects of university activities. Issues such as the proper balance between basic and applied research and the revision of faculty incentives to improve instructional activities are on the agenda. More pertinently to the topic of this paper, the basic issue is the pursuit of the implications of the paradigmatic shift to guiding concepts and practice of engineering education.
Awareness of the new realities facing Brazilian universities and PUC-Rio in particular is a basic starting point for changing the practices of engineering education in a suitable direction. Many aspects of such realities are associated with characteristics specific to post-industrial societies, to the extent that Rio de Janeiro is a significant part of the modern sector of this dual economy. For our purposes, this emerging society is viewed as characterized by new economic and cultural aspects, some of which are shown schematically in Figure 1.
The characteristics of this new reality that directly affect the behavior of engineers are:
The type of opportunities being created by the new realities suggest a need for a broad revision of the profile and the training of engineering professionals. Figure 2 outlines the set of personal attributes which we perceive as essential if these opportunities are to be successfully tapped. Of these attributes we give particular emphasis to the entrepreneurial component, and refer to this new professional as the science-based entrepreneurial engineer.
More explicitly, until recently the CTC trained engineers for conceptual design in what could be described as large and highly organized corporations. The "engineering problem" facing the professional was formulated as essentially a technical one, focusing on narrow disciplinary fields. Thus engineering education meant a solid theoretical and scientific background, a high degree of specialization, and individual problem-solving capability, among other educational qualifications. Markets, business, management, interpersonal and communication skills, and team work played a minimal role or none at all in this view of engineering education.
However, given the changes that have been taking place in society, it has become necessary to reform engineering education so as to promote the profile of the new engineer. The CTC/PUC- Rio, following its strategic planning, has redefined the objectives of the engineering courses in conformity with the analysis above, arriving at the concept of the entrepreneurial engineer, to be discussed in the next section.
The entrepreneurial attitude is the ability to create new values by some reordering of reality. The science-based entrepreneurial engineer aims, by means of a science-based technical intervention (discovery, invention, planning, management organization), to exhibit and to produce new products, services, transactions, resources, technologies or markets which can be recognized as valuable by society. To train such an engineer, we must consider four types of skills:
At this stage it is important to add that we must place a strong emphasis on ethical education, not only because PUC is a Catholic University but also in order to counterbalance the individualistic and selfish tendencies prevailing in postmodern society.
The institutional environment within which the entrepreneurial engineer is to be educated must, of course, also be entrepreneurial. This is one of the cases, like Total Quality, where the university must give the example. One of the measures of an entrepreneurial institution is the degree and nature of its connectedness to the outside world. Furthermore, real-world problems and opportunities do not come circumscribed in accordance with the boundaries of specific areas of knowledge; they are generally multidisciplinary. This means that universities must also develop internal connectivity if they are to provide a proper educational environment for the entrepreneurial engineer.
To extend the degree and nature of its institutional connectivity, PUC-Rio has changed in many ways. For instance, the perception of what is seen as legitimate, mainstream academic work has widened to include scholarly contributions to the solution of real-world problems. This is a significant departure from the old view that such endeavors are "tolerated," either as part of the University's extension service or as a means to raise the necessary funds for one's laboratory. This change in perception must be coupled with organizational innovations that facilitate both higher levels of connectivity and the acquisition of complementary assets needed to address real-world problems.
For instance, the "outside world" has great difficulty in sorting through the university's resources in order to identify the proper expertise to handle a specific problem. Furthermore, cross-departmental research groups, specialized in solving certain real-world problems, find it difficult to establish external connectivity because of their informal nature. There is a problem of external visibility. To cope with both these situations, the University must provide means for the institutionalization of new organizational units in ways that are compatible with the traditional departmental structure. One approach to this is the matrix organization.
For these reasons, we view the entrepreneurial university as directing its attention and building its organizational structure in an expanded "space," in comparison with the "classical" university. To the extent that it adheres to organizational principles that foster education and research within areas of knowledge, the "classical" university breeds fragmentation. In contrast, the entrepreneurial university encourages unification, as it develops its new "problem axis." Figure 3 makes this point graphically.
In conceiving its external partnership, universities must see themselves as a node in an extending productive chain, and thus come to recognize that the chain is only as strong as its weakest node. In this view, it becomes strategic for universities to establish what we call "vertical coalitions" (see Figure 5).
In another direction, several departments at PUC-Rio have come to realize that their most attractive opportunities for growth and development are closely linked with and dependent upon the resources and skills of other departments. This complementarity occurs even between departments of different schools, such as between the Arts and Computer Science Departments, in such areas as image and special-effects technology. This means that, as resources are increasingly limited, departments must strive to develop the key internal coalitions that will allow them to exploit these opportunities. The same phenomenon occurs at the institutional level, in much the same way as industrial firms are forming their strategic alliances. We call these strategic internal partnerships "horizontal coalitions."
In the upstream direction, the links with other universities and governmental agencies are a long-standing academic tradition, and ties with the productive sector are an increasingly accepted relationship. The strength of university-industry ties is, of course, crucial to the idea of educating the entrepreneurial engineer in an entrepreneurial environment. To this end, it is vital that such ties not be limited to "research contracts," but also include industry participation in the instructional activities of the university. This, in turn, should not be limited to traditional lectures and visits, but include courseware planning and evaluation, among other involvements.
Along with these new functions and structure for the university, pedagogic strategies, curricular activities, and curricular contents must change in a compatible manner to allow the training of scientific-based entrepreneurial engineers. And, last but not least, teachers must adapt their behaviors and some of their old values to the new social and academic configuration - an institutional change. This is the most difficult task to perform in the desired direction.
Over the last three years, some instruments and directives have been created at PUC-Rio to achieve these changes. Below we will speak about the pedagogic strategies and curricular activities specially developed to promote entrepreneurial skills in our students. The general directives can be summarized as:
These general directives are behind some of the changes in the courses' pedagogic strategy, which will be illustrated with a few examples.
Hands-on methodology is being introduced in the engineering courses. Another paper presented in this Conference discusses this subject and presents the experiences taking place in CTC/PUC-Rio. Using this methodology, the professor proposes problems that involve the contents of the course, giving the minimum of lectures necessary to define the terms and the objectives of the problems. The activity is left to the students, the professor being a knowledgeable instructor, not providing solutions but indicating ways and means. Students can make mistakes. In fact, they must make mistakes in order to understand, and to correct their mistakes!
Let us take as an example a course the content of which is the system of intellectual property protection (patents and trademarks) and techniques of product design. The teacher informs the students, organized in teams, that an a priori condition of success in the course is to take out a patent at the INPI (the Brazilian patent office). The teams are to find a problem and invent a solution for it, and then to register their invention, if possible, at the INPI. The teacher may give lectures, if the students demand them, about the INPI, the meaning of "trademark," the patents databank, and design methodology.
Another example is the Introduction to Engineering course, taught to freshmen in their first term at the university. Student teams are given a technical challenge, and they have to devise a solution using only K12 of information. Success is evaluated as a function of the viable solution found, the best one receiving an award.
Cooperative learning is used in design courses: usually teamwork is more highly valued than individual work, students taking turns as leaders and presenters. But there are a number of other courses demanding individual effort.
At the moment, the trend is to reorganize undergraduate laboratories as open laboratories: places where students, under supervision, can design and implement solutions to the problems proposed. These laboratories are multidisciplinary spaces that mix students in different courses and at various levels. The Automation Laboratory, for instance, combines electrical, chemical, and mechanical engineering, with chemical plants, electrical motors, and robots being controlled by the same tools in the same environment. The teams include students from different specialized areas, each one performing a convenable task in a multidisciplinary enterprise.
Always following the general directives explained above, students are induced to take part in such optional extracurricular activities as:
In order to earn his or her degree, each student must present an end-of-course paper containing a full project, from the definition of the problem to the implementation of the solution. At present, the problems being proposed are of an interdisciplinary nature, connected with research projects conducted in the university or with problems of companies outside the university. In the traditional curriculum, this was the only activity associated with a complete project, or sometimes involving contact with the outside world.
In addition to traditional courses in engineering and production management, a new set of optional courses were created to foster and develop students' entrepreneurial skills. The idea is to develop an entrepreneurship track for engineering and applied-science students. One such course focuses on entrepreneurial behavior, and attempts to encourage enterprising behavior in students by means of activities that foster creativity, sensibility, and the ability to interact in a group, resorting to procedures akin to those employed in drama schools and psychodrama.
The second course places students in a simulated market environment, created by especially designed software, where they learn to interact with several of the most important players of the market (government, financial institutions, suppliers, and consumers, among others). The third course focuses on techniques for developing a business plan in the context of specific market segments. This third course is, therefore, specific to each engineering department. For instance, the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Departments share a common course dedicated to the software market. In this course, students are stimulated to propose the development of a specific product that interests them, which can then be actually developed in PUC-Rio's new incubator.
Furthermore, special classes will be created for students on the entrepreneurship track covering existing course requirements in the areas of economics, management, ethics, and law. The content of such courses will be tailored to the specific needs of managing small high-tech start-up businesses.
This set of courses is just one of the resources being made available by PUC-Rio to its enterprising students. Under the umbrella of the recently created Genesis Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, students will have access to:
As part of its comprehensive approach to fostering new technical ventures, the University is finalizing an agreement with a local Investment Bank to create the Genesis Fund for New Technological Start-ups.
Finally, the Genesis Institute will house a research team to monitor the efficiency and effectiveness of all these initiatives and propose new measures on the basis of their studies on the creative process and the innovation climate in Brazil. This research team will also be responsible for establishing cooperative ties with counterpart units and programs in foreign institutions.
It is still early to evaluate the results of the changes shown above. Students are strongly motivated for these activities, if they are exposed to them. So far there has been no spontaneous demand for these new activities, because there is little apparent difference between them and traditional ones, and students are understandably suspicious of pedagogic experimentation. Furthermore, attitudes change, for what is demanded here needs plenty of time to be verified. The development of entrepreneurial engineers requires changes in courses, in pedagogy, and in curricula. It also requires radical changes in student evaluation, the object of which can no longer be to test knowledge of academic texts. The use of the space and the time of learning must be redefined: classroom sessions, laboratory sessions, schedules. Also necessary are changes in graduate courses, involving the creation of interdisciplinary master courses tailored to the needs of the productive sectors. These points will be discussed in subsequent papers.
But the most difficult problem of all is how to change teachers' attitude, from that of the researcher-scholar, geared to scientific research and driven by the "publish or perish" directive, to that of a professional aware of the new scientific and technological trends and of his or her external connections, with a renewed sense of the need to keep courses attuned to present trends and needs and with a keen sensibility for student advising. Only through successful examples, changes in the evaluation of professors' careers, "pedagogic" grants, pedagogic awards, and the pressure of necessity can this goal be attained. For this the support of governmental agencies (such as NSF in the U.S., and CNPq, CAPES, or FINEP in Brazil) is essential, because the academic community, based on peer evaluation, is usually unwilling to accept the need for greater emphasis on external connections.
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