<p>Thinking is a pivotal skill for addressing complex problems in the engineering design domain. While various cognitive styles, such as design, critical, creative, and analytical thinking, are well established in engineering education, entrepreneurial thinking has remained comparatively underexplored. This study bridges this gap by systematically comparing entrepreneurial thinking to these four cognitive paradigms. Semi-structured interviews with eleven field-expert faculty members and entrepreneurs provided qualitative data that were analyzed through natural language processing (NLP): keyword extraction and Latent Semantic Indexing yielded the fifty most salient words characterizing entrepreneurial thinking. From these words, fifteen representative statements were formulated and compared with published definitions of design, analytical, critical, and creative thinking using cosine similarity. Results indicate that entrepreneurial thinking integrates and extends beyond other paradigms by emphasizing opportunity recognition, resource leveraging, strategic risk management, and sustainable value creation. Specific competencies include navigating an entrepreneurial journey, understanding business dynamics, communicating effectively, creating job opportunities, launching startups, managing success and failure, tracking industry trends, increasing product value, fostering a growth mindset, and developing new business models. To translate these insights into practice, we outline a five‑module framework that embeds entrepreneurial competencies into the existing workflow of an engineering design course without increasing curricular load.</p>