MBA-Motorsport, I agree with you. Sadly, the skills which make engineers so adept at technical stuff tend to militate against successful entrepreneurship. Look at the example of Steves Jobs and Wozniak. The second was a great engineer, and actually not a bad entrepreneur, though nowhere near as good a business person as Jobs, who was not an engineer at all. (Now I'm not actually sure that this is a good example, but I think you get my point.) I believe undergraduate engineering schools need to replace the smattering of liberal arts courses they make engineering students take, in a bid to make them well rounded, with some business/entrepreneurial courses instead. Toughen up the students and have them go out into the real world understanding how to deal with marketing and management personnel, and also how to make their own way. A public speaking course wouldn't hurt either.
As the title says, can engineers be entrepeneurs, It is a long held view that engineers are not good as entrepeneurs, and i have to agree to some extent, my reasoning is this, Engineers are trained, conditioned, brought up to be conservative, we always have to look at what can go wrong and design to avoid failure. Being an entrepeneur involves risk, gambling, call it what you will but is opposed to the engineers aim to avoid risk and do the job properly.
Now to contradict myself, i feel that engineers can be entrepeneurs if they bring to a project the rigour that we use in our engineering. We can be entrepeneurs and be successfull at it, but not by following the traditional high risk gambling strategies of the norm. We need a new approach that embodies the very high skill level of engineers to create new businesses that can be successful and grow.
The biggest problem i see will be that investors will be unlikely to invest in an engineer because of the pre-conception that engineers cannot be entrepeneurs.
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