DEVELOPMENT OF ENTREPRENEURIAL COMPETENCE OF ENGINEERING STUDENTS

Introduction. Nowadays engineers are expected to be drivers for technical and social innovations. That requires engineering students to be focused on the development of their analytical and design thinking as well as creative potential. Moreover, the current market situation defines the need to develop engineering students' entrepreneurial competence. The customer-oriented approach was introduced to the engineering courses while the students were designing their learning projects. That allowed engineering students to understand the current business trends, the features of the customers, and their needs. Such a complex approach requires effective methods and tools which could enable the development of students' entrepreneurial competence at engineering high school. Purpose. The article aims to substantiate the entrepreneurship teaching method for engineering students' entrepreneurial competence development. Methods. To reveal the factors which impacted the results of the engineering students' entrepreneurial competence development a range of evaluative scales were analyzed. The results of the analysis gave the theoretical basis for the understanding of entrepreneurship as a specific professional behavior. To provide the development of engineering students' entrepreneurial competence the Business Model Canvas approach and the tool were embedded into the engineering Project Design course. Results. During the experiment engineering master students designed their projects using the Business Model Canvas tool embedded into the 7-Steps Engineering Design algorithm. Beforehand the students passed the assessment of entrepreneurial competence and obtained some cases on business fundamentals and the process of business model development. The method was oriented toward designing a technical solution that could solve the customer's definite problem. While working on the project, the students were focused on the design process as well as such things as key partners, key resources, customer needs, value proposition, cost and revenue structure, etc. Conclusion. The method for engineering students' entrepreneurial competence development was proposed. The method was based on the good practices of entrepreneurship introduction to engineering courses. It combined the Business Model Canvas tool and the algorithm for Engineering Design Process. After the experiment, the engineering students demonstrated higher levels of entrepreneurial competence in such aspects as Courage in terms of moral strength, Tolerance to risk, ambiguity, and uncertainty, Creativity, self-reliance, and adaptability. The skills of Commitment and determination as well as Leadership needed further development. In general, the method gave positive results for the improvement of engineering students' entrepreneurial competence.