Abdelraheem M. Abualbasal, Rand E. Badran
This research reviews the situation of entrepreneurship education in Jordan in general and at PSUT in particular focusing on engineering students. It also aims to assess the importance of entrepreneurship for these students, and how they can benefit from it in transforming their course projects into businesses, in addition to giving some recommendations for the university on how it can support entrepreneurship. The value of this paper relies not only on the scarcity of research in Jordan but also on its ability of being applied in other universities and other countries to support entrepreneurship education among engineering students all over the world.
The paper described the situation of PSUT engineering students with regards to the course projects which they make and what actually happens to the resulting products. The research started with attending an exhibition for the engineering students in the embedded systems class where they presented their projects in the presence of some TV channels; the projects included interesting ideas of products which can be actually implemented and sold. A survey was distributed among students to assess their willingness to start their own businesses based on those products and to check their ability to do that, in addition to assessing their awareness of entrepreneurship in general. The survey was distributed during the exhibition under the supervision of the researchers in order to reduce the possibility of misunderstanding the questions. Some recommendations were given to the university based on the data analysis of this survey. Meanwhile, throughout this research interviews were conducted with Jordanian entrepreneurs to investigate the reasons of failure in the Jordanian market.
Four years after applying the above mentioned recommendations another survey was distributed among students of the same major in order to assess the effect of implementing those recommendations.