Teaching business plan negotiation : fostering entrepreneurship among business and engineering students

FROM PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS to complex business dealings, negotiations are essential forms of communication. But negotiation skills are often neglected in university courses. One reason for this neglect is the difficulty of teaching negotiations effectively. Such teaching requires both an underlying theoretical base and activities that provide students with direct practice in negotiating. In this article, we describe a new approach to teaching negotiation through personalized situated learning. After a brief introduction to the approach, we present the scenario for a negotiation that helps engineering students become more entrepreneurial as they develop a business plan to secure funding from venture capitalists for a start-up IT company.