The development of engineers into entrepreneurs and business leaders in South Africa.

Abstract

Over the years there has been a great emphasis on the study of the transition of engineers to managers across business. The emphasis has resulted to the fact that a great number of engineers find the transition from engineers to managers a lot easier as structures in organizations have been put in place to allow this transition to be seamless. With a high-growth potential entrepreneurial ventures in terms of their creative ideas when it comes technology in various disciplines, engineers have not effectively been developed and have somewhat been neglected by the academia in general. The aim of the study was to investigate the development of engineers into entrepreneurs and business leaders in South Africa. The failure of South Africa to rapidly develop engineers into entrepreneurs and business leaders can be seen as one of the drivers of entrepreneurial activities being significantly low in the country. Understanding the importance of entrepreneurial activities in any emerging economy it therefore should become a priority for the government. A probability sample of 220 engineers was drawn from the database of the National Society of Black Engineers-South Africa (NSBE-SA). Data was collected using a web-based questionnaire developed specifically for this study by the researcher, the questionnaire was also emailed to other participants. A salient feature of this study is that 71.82% of participants were interested in becoming entrepreneurs and out of those 51% were male participants compared to female participants with 21.82%. The main driving forces for the participants wanting to be entrepreneurs was the ability to own their time and financial freedom which come with one being an entrepreneur. Over 60% of the respondents indicated that their engineering qualification did not prepare them to be entrepreneurs, further to that 90% of the participants indicated that the engineering curriculum should pay much more attention to entrepreneurship. The study went on further to recommend a long-term strategy of developing an Engineering Entrepreneurship Program in collaboration with the institutions of higher learning in order to develop engineers into entrepreneurs and business leaders. This recommendation is in line with the triple helix model of innovation which was greatly explored in both the literature and the findings.