Three more faculty to incorporate entrepreneurship into courses

Three additional faculty members will teach revised courses this year through the new Entrepreneurship Across the Curriculum, or ExC, program.

George Catalano, professor of bioengineering; Diane Crews, visiting assistant professor in the College of Community and Public Affairs; and Weiyi Meng, professor of computer science, submitted winning proposals in the program’s second round of funding, said Eugene Krentsel, assistant vice president for Technology Transfer and Innovation Partnerships.

ExC is part of an ongoing effort to incorporate entrepreneurship into the curriculum at Binghamton. The program encourages faculty members to create or modify a course in such a way that a substantial amount of time is devoted to entrepreneurship. Instructors receive a $1,000 grant to support their work on curriculum revisions.

“This is unique to Binghamton,” Krentsel said. “There are other schools that have done this with engineering and business students, but we are going to expose students across a huge variety of disciplines to ideas about entrepreneurship and what it means to be entrepreneurial.”

Catalano will revise Modeling and Design for a Sustainable Planet, a technical elective for undergraduates first offered last fall. The class focuses on integrating an eco-effective design methodology into engineering design. Catalano will introduce new case studies that demonstrate the potential to create wealth-generating enterprises, serve the needs of society and have a positive effect upon the environment. Students will use a soft-systems methodology (SSM) in studying the cases.

“George’s proposal stood out,” Krentsel said. “He knows, and his students will learn, that entrepreneurship is not always about making a buck. We’re not teaching greediness; we’re talking about how to promote societal good by being entrepreneurial.”

Crews will revise the Proseminar in Civic Entrepreneurship. This course has been taught by students for students for several years with collaborative support and guidance from Crews and campus and community leaders. Crews plans to introduce a unit that deals with the practicalities of establishing and marketing student- and graduate-owned and operated enterprises across various fields. The class is intended to increase networking, innovation and social/civic/business entrepreneurship among Binghamton University students and local young professionals.

Meng will revise a research-oriented course called Web Data Management, which he has offered to advanced master’s and PhD students for several years. The class covers new techniques for retrieving documents from search engines, metasearch engine techniques, database approaches for Web data management and more. Meng will revise the course to include details of his own experience starting a company along with stories of successful Web entrepreneurs.

Three other faculty members were chosen as recipients of ExC grants earlier. Krishnaswami “Hari” Srihari, dean of the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science, will create an Entrepreneurship Across Engineering module that can be incorporated into senior-level and graduate courses. David Campbell in the Department of Public Administration plans to revise Introduction to Nonprofit Management and Leadership to include more content related to social entrepreneurship. And Carolyn Pierce in the Decker School of Nursing will create a class focused on complexity science as a tool to develop innovative health-care provider roles.

Krentsel’s office is spearheading the program with the Small Scale Systems Integration and Packaging Center (S3IP). “We hope that Entrepreneurship Across the Curriculum will become a signature program for our University, just as Languages Across the Curriculum has been,” he said.

Krentsel has discussed plans to expand the initiative with other schools in the region, including Broome Community College, and expects to have more ExC grants awarded this academic year.