Influence of entrepreneurial aptitude on technology entrepreneurship course performance

In a computing technology entrepreneurship course offered in fall 2011, students were separated into teams of three and four students and taught the concepts and skills of teamwork, innovation, and entrepreneurship. They applied these concepts and skills to an open-ended project for a niche market financial or healthcare information technology product. Each team produced a product supported by a business plan and PowerPoint presentation as the project deliverable. The course was supported by mentors for the teams and guest lecturers. In spring 2011, a Data Mining course was offered where no direct instruction in teamwork, innovation, and entrepreneurship was provided, but the student teams were assigned a similar open-ended project. The objective of this exploratory study is to evaluate students and teams´ relative increase in entrepreneurial aptitude. The two courses´ performances were determined by the project quality and course grades (average in-class and final examinations) supplemented by a post survey of student perceptions of course related gains and changes in attitudes. As expected, the quality of the team projects produced and the correlation analysis of the examination grades in the Technology Entrepreneurship course showed relative improvement over those produced in the Data Mining course.