Intrapreneurial Competence Building through Quality Function Deployment and Multi-source Interactive Learning: A Module in Entrepreneurship for Engineering Undergraduates

Abstract

Creation of new and potentially fast growing businesses is the most obvious, and in popular perception, the only, consequence of entrepreneurial activity. The standard approach to entrepreneurship education too is to build around this notion. From an educational perspective, entrepreneurship, though is a problematic area, practicing entrepreneurs are rarely formally trained in entrepreneurship. A high proportion of individuals who receive entrepreneurship education, in some form or other, do not become entrepreneurs. In formal education, entrepreneurship education's share is negligible at most places. Entrepreneurship is not a conventional profession in the sense that formal qualifications are not needed to work as an entrepreneur. Full-time, long-term courses exclusively designed to impart entrepreneurial skills targeted towards those who want to start new ventures are rare. A large majority of those, who receive entrepreneurship education in universities, are training to become business or engineering professionals and are receiving it as an adjunct or supplementary competency in the belief that it increases the value of training in their main profession. Implicit in this belief is the expectation that graduates from these fields have a high probability of starting independent business and if any of them were to explore such a possibility, entrepreneurial competencies may come handy. Naturally, the approach and content of entrepreneurship education for those who have an explicit goal of starting a business immediately upon completion and for those who are packing in their educational baggage a small entrepreneurship kit to be opened and used, if need be, should be different. As an educator I would be at a loss to know what should be the contents of such a kit, apart from being uncertain, not knowing when it is going to be opened, whether it would be useable, if opened too long after, and what expiry date to be mentioned on it. The prospective students, in case such a redundancy was made known, would be wary of taking it at all, as they have, by choosing a course in engineering or business made this plain that they do not wish to start a business immediately and be better advised to look for its more updated version as and when the need arose. By this reasoning entrepreneurship education peripheral to a mainstream training such as business or engineering apparently has no meaning.