February 19, 2018
The Darla Moore School of Business and the University of South Carolina's College of Engineering and Computing (CEC) will be rolling out the M.S. in Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurial Engineering program in Fall 2018. The goal of the collaborative degree program is to give STEM students the business acumen needed to get their ideas off the ground.
"No single college has all the answers," said Juliana Iarossi, the Moore School professor who worked with CEC to bring this idea to life. "We saw a need to bring engineering and business together to empower STEM students to bring ideas to fruition and determine if they represent a potential business."
The idea for the one-year master's program started with Ehsan Jabbarzadeh, a CEC chemical and biomedical engineering professor, and after he and Iarossi talked about their desire to increase collaboration between the two schools.
"Any healthy economy has companies that are growing," Iarossi said. "What we need is a workforce that's better able to respond to changes in customer needs and technology by identifying new and better ways to solve problems."
Graduates of this program will be prepared to pursue careers along two different paths: innovation and product development within established organizations or innovation in early-stage emerging ventures.
"We are hoping to develop STEM professionals who make tangible, innovative contributions to their organizations — using business skills to look at technology in new ways," Iarossi said.
The program will focus both on technology and how to commercialize it. Classes will be taught by engineering and computer science professors as well as Iarossi and fellow management professors Dirk Brown and Laura Cardinal.
Initially, the program will admit up to 50 students a year and hope to have about 25 for this fall committed by the end of April. It's a 12-month program made up of two semesters of intense evening classes — throughout which students work on developing their ideas - followed by a summer of immersion either within an internship or through an innovation project within the company a student works for already.
Students can apply for the Fall 2018 semester through the end of April on the CEC website. For more information, contact Entrepreneurial_Engineering@sc.edu.
By Madeleine Vath