UW Tacoma Joins National Engineering Network

The University of Washington Tacoma has been accepted into KEEN, a national network dedicated to training engineers to have an entrepreneurial mindset.

KEEN, the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network, brings together more than 60 public and private engineering schools who share in a mission to reach all undergraduate engineering students with an entrepreneurial mindset so they can create personal, economic, and societal value through a lifetime of meaningful work. The Network also powers “Engineering Unleashed,” a community of more than 5,000 engineering faculty, staff and administrators from KEEN and beyond, enabling them to share best practices, curriculum, research, case studies and other resources connected to entrepreneurially minded learning.

“The ultimate goal of KEEN is to help engineering schools go beyond teaching just technical skills and focus on mindset,” said Dr. Heather Dillon, professor and chair of mechanical engineering at UW Tacoma’s School of Engineering & Technology (SET). “We want our students to create value for themselves, their community and society during the entire span of their careers. Engineering attracts people who are by nature problem-solvers. We want to foster their curiosity, their ability to make out-of-the-box connections and their persistence in the face of challenges.” Dillon will guide UW Tacoma’s partnership with KEEN, bringing the lessons she learned during many years researching and training other institutions on entrepreneurial mindset.

Other KEEN schools include such noted engineering powerhouses as Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, Duke and Ohio State. UW Tacoma is the only UW campus in the network and the only KEEN partner in Washington. The campus was invited to join after many years of collaboration with UW Tacoma engineering faculty.

“KEEN’s approach to promoting an entrepreneurial mindset is strongly aligned with our core values in SET and at UW Tacoma,” said Dr. Raj Katti, Dean of the School of Engineering & Technology. “High-impact practices like course-based undergraduate research experiences are a fundamental part of our curriculum and a key element in our strategy to make an engineering education more accessible to historically-marginalized communities.”

SET is investing in course-based undergraduate research experiences, or CUREs, in a big way. A “Research for All” grant from the Kern Family Foundation is supporting a collaboration by SET and seven other engineering schools to dramatically increase undergrad access to research opportunities. (Read “Breaking Down Engineering Barriers” to learn more.) As part of the grant, UW Tacoma is working with KEEN to study 60 CUREs implemented across more than 15 institutions in the network.

SET’s emphasis on an entrepreneurial mindset is in line with a variety of other initiatives across UW Tacoma. “Helping our students figure out how they can build entrepreneurial efforts that support the community is at the core of our mission as an urban-serving university,” said Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Andrew Harris. “Even if our students decide starting and owning a business is not for them, they will benefit from exposure to the basic tenets of entrepreneurship: curiosity, connections and value creation.”

Some of those other initiatives include VIBE (Veterans Incubator for Better Entrepreneurship), the Milgard School of Business Entrepreneurship Center and the Global Innovation & Design Lab.