Orienting engineering education towards innovation, entrepreneurism, and industry partnerships the case of the MIT-Portugal Program

Engineering education has always served as a close nexus between academia and industry, and as a strong determinant of a country's innovative and economic performance. As many developed countries are struggling with the loss of low-cost manufacturing to global competitors, governments regularly turn to their institutions of engineering education to facilitate the transition into an innovation based economy and move up the value chain. This paper discusses how engineering education in Portugal is being locally transformed with the help of a strong international collaboration. As part of a larger process of educational reform, the MIT-Portugal Program (MPP) has gathered the country's leading institutions in an innovative education and research consortium centered on the engineering systems paradigm. MPP has employed a wide range of policy tools to re-orient engineering education in some key areas more towards innovation, entrepreneurship, and industry cooperation. These tools include: The creation of 7 new educational programs targeting 4 strategic focus areas in the field of engineering systems. Each program includes mandatory components of innovation, entrepreneurship, management, and leadership skills, and features innovative curriculum design based on modularized term structure, lab and industry rotations, and the recruitment of a highly specific student body with strong industry propensity. A focus on internationalization of education and science, raising the percentage of international students to almost 40% (four times higher than comparable Portuguese graduate programs), and fostering international mobility and outreach. Extensive networking between groups and institutions, paired with a high degree of student and researcher mobility, allowing students to benefit from the country's best educators and research labs, intensifying communication and collaboration, enlarging individual scientific networks, and creating critical mass in research power. Access to an associated network of 50+ industry affiliates, involving industry broadly in student theses and lecturing. The paper presents the results of multiple surveys to demonstrate how the program, now in its final year of the first 5-year funding phase, has yielded important and visible successes in overhauling engineering education in key areas for Portugal's future. MPP is well on its way to becoming the first truly international Portuguese engineering program in terms of networking, competitiveness, and student attraction, and could serve as a model strategy for Portugal for addressing broader challenges at the intersection of engineering education, research, and innovation. Moreover, the Program trajectory holds important lessons for other countries trying to prepare their traditional engineering education with a greater degree of industry orientation, an innovation-prone ecosystem, and a culture of entrepreneurship.