Saturday, February 6, 2010

UNIVERSITI MALAYSIA PAHANG STUDENT’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS TECHNO LEADERSHIP: A CASE STUDY


Mr Roselan Mohamed Tahar
Universiti Malaysia Pahang
E-mail: roselan@ump.edu.my


ABSTRACT:

The purpose of this research paper is to evaluate the attitude of UMP undrgraduates towards Techno Leadership by using Questionnaire Survey Approach, Face to Face Interview, and endorsed by Biofeedback Analysis. The integrated findings will support the development of a strategic tool to encourage UMP undergraduates towards entrepreneurship. The combined total quantities of undergraduates who have undergone the various tests were 238 from various faculties with varied CGPA achievements. The results of the research reflected a high level of motivation among the undergraduates towards self employment. However, there was a low indication of techno leadership where their knowledge of entrepreneurial tools are high but this was restricted by their inability to utilize the available tools. As a treatment to assist this constraint, a strategic tool is being developed to enhance techno leadership among UMP undergraduates to cater the inadequacies of relevant experiential business learning.

KEYWORDS:
Techno Leadership; Strategic Tool Game; Experiential Business Learning; UMP.




1. Introduction
The Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia through Higher Education Leadership Academy (AKEPT) is acutely seeking studies or writings to implement emerging practices of entrepreneurship in higher education so as to transform graduates to be able to face current entrepreneurial development and future economic challenges.
Pursuant to this search of excellence, my research was done in such direction at Universiti Malaysia Pahang to contribute towards techno leadership development among engineering undergraduates. Entrepreneurship education should be able to play the role of significant contribution to improve quality of graduate start ups and intellectual attitudes in entrepreneurship in the possible short term. Not many empirical studies have examined the entrepreneurial talent and potential of university students and thereafter develop and facilitate this immediate source of future entrepreneurs.
The central aim of this paper is among others is to make observations and made necessary recommendations with respect to the following:
1. To measure UMP’s student’s attitude towards technopreneurship.
2. To evaluate level of Techno Leadership among UMP students.
3. To facilitate strategic tool to enhance UMP students in Techno Leadership.
We conducted an initial survey involving 238 students comprising of 136 male and 102 female from all faculties. This was followed by a face to face interview and finally we had a biofeedback analysis done on volunteer basis. From this paper, we develop ‘A graduate Entrepreneur Leadership Simulator Program’ as a simple strategic tool to enhance experiential business learning among engineering undergraduates. The impact of entrepreneurship education has been recognized as one of the crucial factors that help undergraduates to understand and foster an entrepreneurial attitude (Gorman et al., 1997; Kourilsky and Walstad, 1998).
According to Sankaran (2004), every country, state and region has been struggling to promote entrepreneurship. All have access to capital markets, sound legal systems, and exceptional telecommunications infrastructure. But only some areas are flourishing. Why? The answer may be found in government’s fondness for simple solutions, the most common of which is to provide seed capital. For seed capital to create something extraordinary, it must be accompanied by novel ideas, which originate from creative and unconventional individuals. In a modern economy, top tier universities, faculties, research laboratories and incubators are places of steady flow of technical ideas and breeding ground of entrepreneurs.
Undergraduates as would be entrepreneurs play important role as he drives the forces of creative disorder by bringing innovation to market:
“… the function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention or more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of materials or a new outlet for products by reorganizing an industry and so on… This kind of activity is primarily responsible for the recurrent ‘prosperities’ that revolutionize the economic organism and the recurrent ‘recessions’ that are due to the disequilibrating impact of new products or methods.” (Schumpeter, 1976, p. 132)

2. Literature Review
According to Timmons (1994), the great discovery of the extraordinary power of the entrepreneurial mind is a silent revolution in the US. Based on his study, one third of Harvard Business School (HBS) graduates ended up working for themselves and 90% of HBS students have the dream of self-employment. Survey results in the 1990’s have confirmed this trend. In a study of business school senior undergraduates, 55% preferred operating their own business given the complete freedom of choice, but only 5% of the respondents indicated they would probably choose to operate their own business after considering their actual situation and constraints (Brenner et al., 1991).
Ghazali et al., (1995) have conducted a survey on 2486 graduates in Singapore (with a response rate of 34.1%) who graduated after 1-8 years, and around 8.6% of them to be self employed. Thus the desire to start a business far outweighed the actual growth of self employment in a number of industrialized countries. Although a wide gap exists between student aspiration and actual self-employment, there is an increasing trend in moving towards an attitude of entrepreneurship among the students.
The next section presents our findings from the survey, face to face interviews and biofeedback analysis. Specifically, our respondents are 238 undergraduate students from the various engineering faculties of varied CGPA achievements as follows:-
Number of Students
Faculty of Chemical & Natural Resources Engineering 78
Faculty of Electrical & Electrics Engineering 15
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering 95
Faculty of Civil & Environmental Engineering 17
Faculty of Computer Systems & Software Engineering 33

Next methodology is explained and the findings are concluded with recommendations and action plans to attract policy implications with respect to university educators, government policy makers, administrators, researchers, legislators and bankers to institute changes from conventional practices. The concluding remarks may initiate some directions for further research.
3. Methodology
The survey was conducted on 238 students as well as face to face interviews with researchers in the area of entrepreneurship. The motivation related questions were to gauge the interest to be self-employed or to be an employee. The socio economic background measures include the type of family income status, inclination towards starting a business, father’s occupation and mother’s occupation. Student’s attitude towards risk is measured by their responses to their fear of possible failures. Entrepreneurial knowledge is measured on student’s self perceived knowledge in starting a business and knowledge in managing business.

4. Results on Background Factors and entrepreneurial interest.
From the demographic analysis , it is observed that the father’s occupation of undergraduates is majority employee/salaried worker (41.6%). Generally, the occupation of mothers are housewives (79%). The parental occupational background may have an impact on the outcome of this survey as Malaysian parents normally desire their children to be salaried worker rather than an entrepreneur. However, we noted that the financial status of the respondent’s family is not related to his or her personal business interest. The source of this interest is based more on his or her own noble idea and strong personality drive rather than family interference. From the survey data, it is found that the respondents (39.5%) have low risk taking ability. They are too cautious to take business calculated risks. This is more so when there is an availability of lucrative prospects in the corporate and public sectors in Malaysia. The undergraduates feel that there is a risk for them to start new business and forgo opportunities of ‘comfort zones’ in corporate and public sector as the economic system in Malaysia still strongly emphasizes on paper qualification. On the other hand, UMP undergraduates (48.3%) are aware that noble business ideas, strong networking and supportive financial aid are very important to help them start a new business. Only about 27.9% of the undergraduates are willing to be self employed in next 5 years on their own. This finding is low if compared to students in Singapore or US. The entrepreneurial interest of UMP undergraduates is low as they are afraid of two high eventual risks that is firstly, the possibility of going bankrupt (98.7%) and secondly, the possibility of suffering a personal failure (90.7%). Nevertheless, the undergraduates (more than 95%) generally believe that there are 3 important factors that can facilitate their new business success namely, the political climate, the overall economy and external factors. A word of caution needs to be mentioned here as the risk measure employed here may be too regimented on a maximum of five Likert-scale scores.

5. Conclusions
In this paper, UMP undergraduate’s attitude towards entrepreneurship is examined with limitations. The findings have borderless rooms for further research to strengthen entrepreneur culture and entrepreneurial attitude among undergraduates. Further investigations are required to link entrepreneurial interest and knowledge of undergraduates to start a new business are greatly desired. Many UMP undergraduates are interested to start a new business are in need of adequate total preparation, support from university and commitment from the Government. Their experiential business knowledge and experiences are inadequate. The constant fear of business failure is embedded in them and this ‘psychology fear’ need to be addressed by government policy makers, university educators, administrators, legislators and the conservative bankers. The emerging existence of such potential and talented non business undergraduates in engineering faculty demands a tailor made techno leadership course to produce entrepreneurs. As UMP is an engineering based university, strong direct efforts and policies need to be transformed and implemented in all the seven faculties to facilitate technopreneurship.
We have summarise the findings as follows:
1. UMP undergraduates have shown high motivation towards technoprenership as suggested in survey based on figure of 131 out of 238 students are willing to be self employed. This finding is further endorsed by the interview exercise of 42.58% reported as good and 41.2% as fair.
2. UMP undergraduates are not risk takers as observed and recorded from the interviews sessions.
3. UMP undergraduates are aware of the technopreneurship tools available but they do not know how to utilize them. This is obvious as shown in the interview results where they know correctly the technopreneurship tools (capital, ICT, networking, equipment and logistics) but they do not have the knowledge to start a new business.
4. UMP undergraduates do not show techno leadership quality as evidenced in the interviews conducted. However, personality profile tests conducted on UMP undergraduates revealed that they have personality score of above 81 (6 undergraduates) and between 71-80 comprised of 8 undergraduates.
5. UMP undergraduates have shown positive personality traits on individual strength such as integrity, skillful, focus, creative, hardworking, trustworthy, confidence. Personality Profiling Tests had revealed that UMP undergraduates have low level of persistency and discipline. However, they display openness to new ideas, cooperation and leadership.
6. From the face to face interviews conducted, we observed that UMP undergraduates requested experiential learning towards technopreneur leadership.


Recommendations:
1. Establish Koperasi Siswa UMP via existing undergraduate’s mall with immediate effect.
2. Develop a “Graduate Entrepreneur Leadership Simulator Program” to enhance Techno Leadership.
3. Core Engineering Faculty of UMP to offer Technopreneur Master Program with 60% orientation towards technopreneurship focusing on experiential business learning.
4. Create and develop experiential business learning programs and trainings at faculty level.
5. Undergraduates need to undergo the strengthening of EQ Training

We do not strive for completeness. The above agenda is an attempt to enhance entrepreneurial attitude among UMP undergraduates. Technopreneurship is the work of man but to produce Techno leaders is by no means easy. By working on this agenda, more researches and relevant logistic support can help policy makers, university educators, legislators, bankers and administrators to help further improvement on the entrepreneurial achievements of undergraduates.





Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the research assistance by Prof Madya Dr Muhammad Nubli bin Abdul Wahab in biofeedback analysis and personality profiling. ( See Appendix A)

References
Brenner, O.C., Pringle, C.D., Greenhaus, J.H., 1991. Perceived fulfillment of organizational employment versus entrepreneurship: work values and career intentions of Business College graduates. Journal of Small Business Management 29 (3).62-74.
Dana L. P. (2001). The education and training of entrepreneurs in Asia. Education + Training Vol. 43 No 89, 405-415.
Ghazali, A., Ghosh, B.C., Tay, R.S.T., 1995. The determinants of self employment choice among university graduates in Singapore. International Journal of Management 12(1), 26-35.
Gorman, G., Hanlon, D., King, W., 1997. Some research perspectives on entrepreneurship education and education for small business management: a ten-year literature review. International Small Business Journal 15 (3), 56-77.
Kourilsky, M.L., Walstad, W.B., 1998. Entrepreneurship and female youth: knowledge, attitudes, gender differences, and educational practices. Journal of Business Venturing 13 (1), 77-88.
Timmons. J.A.1994.New Venture Creation-Entrepreneurship for the 21st Century. Irwin, Boston.
Robert Craven, Kick Start Your Business, Virgin Business Press,2008.
Sankaran Venkataraman, 2004. Regional transformation through technological entrepreneurship. Journal of Business Venturing 19, 153-167.
Schumpeter, J.A., 1976. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Harper and Row, New York, N.Y.


Roselan Mohamed Tahar is a lecturer in the Centre of Modern Language & Human Science at Universiti Malaysia Pahang. He obtained his C.E.M.(UNE), D.I.T. (DBP), B. Econs., (UM) and M.o.M. from UIA. Currently, he is pursuing PhD. in Entrepreneurship. He was directly involved for 18 years in screening, supervising and monitoring entrepreneurs while working as ASPA Planning Executive, Credit & Marketing Officer Maybank, East Coast Regional Manager of Pembangunan Leasing Corp., and in Pahang State Government as the Head of Entrepreneur Development Centre at UPEN. His current research interests, publications and talks is in Entrepreneurship, Techno Leadership and Business Consultancy.