Products and Markets

The Course

In 2013-14, during a curricular revision process, Olin faculty identified the need and opportunity to revitalize the Entrepreneurship program at Olin. Entrepreneurship is a cornerstone of an Olin engineering education, and faculty often speak of students being trained with technical skills undergirded by contextual understanding in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences PLUS training in entrepreneurial thinking. We created a foundational course that all first-year students take in their second semester. The course creators were an interdisciplinary team led by Lawrence Neeley (Entrepreneurship and design), and including Aaron Hoover (mechanical engineering),Joanne Pratt (biology), Keith Hopper (entrepreneurship, professional practitioner), and Caitrin. This work solidified in Caitrin a commitment to the importance of students connecting their drives and passions with their work lives and with their efforts to realize change in the world. Caitrin became involved in this initiative because: 1) she saw the opportunity to help reframe the field as being about identifying and pursuing one's passions, irrespective of whether something is a money-making venture; 2) she wanted to help students understand the relationships among their own and their customers' values and how the concept of "value" itself is contextually situated; 3) she wanted to help to create a class where we could teach engineering students important new routes to solving problems. 

In addition to teaching the course, Caitrin and colleagues have offered workshops on the course to participants in Olin’s Summer Institute. 

Additional Links

Read about a sustainable fashion event in Products and Markets: connecting entrepreneurship to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.