Real-World Solutions
An interdisciplinary Penn State program combines fieldwork, engineering, and entrepreneurship to build sustainable enterprises and improve lives in developing countries.
By Khanjan Mehta, Sarah Zappe, Mary Lynn Brannon, and Yu Zhao
Our article describes the genesis, philosophies, pedagogies, learning outcomes, and impacts of an academic program designed to address global development challenges while preparing students for careers in social innovation and global sustainable development. The Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship (HESE) Program at Penn State engages students and faculty in the rigorous research, design, field-testing, and launch of technology-based social enterprises in several low- and middle-income countries. Ventures range from low-cost greenhouses and solar food dryers to telemedicine systems and inexpensive biomedical devices. Through a series of five courses, HESE teams systematically advance ventures over multiple years with aspirations for large-scale commercialization and dissemination. Alongside the social enterprises, students work on original publishable research that strengthens ventures by ensuring they use an evidence-based and data-driven approach.
While half the students in HESE are engineering majors, the rest come from every other college across campus. Over half are women, a compelling number for engineering and entrepreneurship, both fields with poor gender equity. Venture teams espouse empathy, equity, and collaboration to break down disciplinary and cultural silos, and develop scalable and sustainable solutions. Sustainability, in this context, refers to the notion that solutions must be technologically appropriate, socially acceptable, environmentally benign, and economically sustainable. Ideas, presentations, and prototypes do not solve problems; the real challenge is implementation, assessment, and fast-paced pivoting. A wide range of political, cultural, social, economic, and human factors need to be overcome before a technology product has a tangible, measurable social impact. The real challenge lies in getting the job done in a harmonious manner. HESE’s focus on execution and sustainable impact drives the courses, pedagogies, and program operations.
With support from the Leonhard Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education, a mixed-methods study incorporating surveys, focus groups, and students’ responses to a course blog was utilized to examine the effectiveness of the HESE program. Results confirm that HESE coursework develops students’ competencies in global awareness and engagement, multidisciplinary teamwork, and social entrepreneurship. The learning gains and improved self-efficacy are further confirmed by the entrepreneurial and research outcomes. Over the past decade, HESE ventures have collectively affected the lives of a few million people across several countries. For example, a flagship HESE venture at the water-food-energy nexus involves affordable greenhouses that have been commercialized in Kenya, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, and Mozambique, with similar efforts underway in Zambia, Cambodia, Burkina Faso, and elsewhere. A pre-primary telemedicine social enterprise, Mashavu: Networked Health Solutions, has seven full-time employees who have provided health services to over 40,000 people and educated about 120,000 more in central Kenya over the past four years. Fieldwork has led to more than 110 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings, the majority with undergraduates as lead authors.
HESE is transformative for most students as it exposes them to situations, opportunities, and career paths they never imagined. HESE students pursue a wide range of nontraditional careers, from launching such social ventures as providing low-cost feminine hygiene products and energy monitoring to repairing of obstetric fistulas by qualified surgeons, improving rural supply chains, and consulting with the World Food Program and Clinton Health Access Initiative. We are delighted to share the internal workings of the HESE program because a critical mass of similar academic programs can alter the perception of such efforts from a “save the world mission,” with students going to poor countries to save people, to a rigorous, multidisciplinary, integrative discipline that inspires students and faculty to work shoulder-to-shoulder with partners to build sustainable and scalable enterprises that deliver social impact.
Khanjan Mehta is director of the Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship program at Pennsylvania State University. Sarah Zappe is director of Assessment and Instructional Support at Penn State’s Leonhard Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education, where Mary Lynn Brannon (now retired) was an instructional support specialist. Yu Zhao recently received her Ph.D. in educational psychology from Penn State. This article is excerpted from “An Educational and Entrepreneurial Ecosystem to Actualize Technology-Based Social Ventures,” which appears in Advances in Engineering Education’s forthcoming special issue on engineering entrepreneurship education.
Image Courtesy of Penn State HESE