The Necessity of Engineering Entrepreneurship Education for Developing Economies

Knowledge is recognized as an important ingredient for economic growth in addition to physical capital and labor. Entrepreneurship can be an important mechanism by which knowledge spills over and becomes commercialized. Entrepreneurship involves the nexus of two phenomena: the presence of lucrative opportunities and the presence of enterprising individuals. The process of opportunity enactment is outlined as a conceptual extension of a given body of knowledge into a perceived possibility of economic gain. An engineer is assumed to be endowed with a certain stock of knowledge; accordingly, he will be confronted with the choice of how best to appropriate the economic return from that knowledge. So, future engineers have to be trained how to recognize and develop new technologies and to take the technologies to market and to practice industry proven commercialization processes within an academic environment. The encouragement of high-technology entrepreneurship is an increasing focus of enterprise agency activities in growing numbers of developed economies. Developing countries need to encourage entrepreneurial cultures in order to enhance their economic growth and improve the quality of life of their people. This study is designed to investigate the nature of entrepreneurship, the potential impact of entrepreneurship education and the imperative need of engineering entrepreneurship education for developing economies; taking Egypt as an example