About Entrepreneurial Mindset

Oct 3
2 min read

Updated: Oct 4

This Entry was written by our Club Member Dr. Nicole Aguilar, Director of the Mike Loya Center for Innovation and Commerce at UTEP.

The entrepreneurial mindset (EM) is a way of life. EM refers to the traits that most successful entrepreneurs exhibit. But it is not just for business. An entrepreneurial mindset is a way of thinking, seeing, and acting that's valuable in any career or life situation.

At UTEP, we teach students to think like entrepreneurs by first helping them believe they can achieve higher level thinking. We found it is important to guide students in understanding how to connect skills anchored in entrepreneurial thinking and integrate them into their everyday lives to overcome challenges, achieve a new mindset, and maximize success.

Teaching students the entrepreneurial mindset is important because they learn and strengthen skills that prove to be valuable in every career and academic path.

Through our research we identified 5 domains:

Identity & Self-Awareness: Understanding your own strengths and passions and how they can be a force for good.
Growth Mindset: Believing that your skills can always be improved through effort, learning, and persistence.
Creativity & Innovation: Thinking differently to create new solutions and bring ideas to life.
Critical Thinking & Problem-Solving: The ability to analyze issues, evaluate different options, and take effective action.
Leadership & Teamwork: Inspiring and collaborating with others to achieve a common goal.

My goal is to teach students to apply these skills in their personal, academic, and professional lives while understanding their own potential as creative thinkers, opportunists, and individuals resilient in a variety of settings. We believe in teaching EM to students who want to become stronger problem-solvers and communicators while learning to spot challenges and turn them into innovative, practical solutions.

Setbacks, challenges, and even failure will always exist. However, through our approach to teaching EM, students are taught failure is about feedback, not defeat.