Technopreneurship should be a Career Option: A Case Study in a Technical College in Kolkata-West Bengal, India

Abstract

There was a widespread view during the 1990s that the technological entrepreneurship in Asia, particularly in India and more specifically in West Bengal had lagged behind Europe and United States as opposed to the more traditional areas in which the Asian family businesses have excelled such as property development, retailing and trade. During the 2000s there was a revolutionary change in the education system in Bengal, as a number of private engineering colleges came into the picture, creating a number of engineers every year. There was a widespread assumption that the revolution in information technology required the invention of a completely new business paradigm. In India, particularly in Bengal, there was a special sense of urgency about the need to redirect entrepreneurial instinct and effort into technological ventures instead of the more traditional areas of entrepreneurship such as retail, trading and property investment activity. The role of a Technopreneurship is seen as someone who brings together research talent, venture capital, new business concepts and management skills to create commercially successful technological innovations. In this paper we study whether the emerging engineers/engineering students of age group of 19 to 22 years coming out from these private engineering colleges every year are considering Technopreneurship as career options or not. From the statistical analysis of the collected data we have found that the new generations of engineering students are not serious about considering Technopreneurship as career option.