Do Engineers Make Good Entrepreneurs?

Some do; some don't. Such classes might be helpful, but probably not universally successful.

Mark Twain has sid " To be successful, you need to things... ingorance and confidence"

Engineer is not an entrepreneur. Entrepreneur is one who finally succeeds in business.

Well sure both words start with E & end with a consonant that makes them the same right?

An Engineer can be an entrepreneur but an entrepreneur need not be an engineer.

Apart from the fact that entrepreneurs would be out and doing, rather than sit behind a desk, there is a more disturbing question; "Do entrepreneurs make good engineers?". The cart is generally behind the horse

From my personal experience very rarely yes.Engineers are commercially weak they lack in controlling finance so finally land in financial mess.Most of the CEOs are financial personels, they have expertise in handling money.

A successful entrepreneur is someone that can sell something that does not yet exist. The focus is on sales. Once orders are placed, they proceed to successfully design and manufacture the item, or develop the service, and deliver it at a profit. No mean feat is that.

Engineers typically want the products designed (and possibly perfected, if like me) and manufactured, prior to sales being permitted. (requiring only scaling up of production)

Both methods are employed... and there is no 'right way'... only those who make their choice work. It is an extremely severe work load and dedication.

I would say that Engineers that are successful entrepreneurs would largely be those that sell their certified professional knowledge and experience, which would conform to the second 'type'.

Chris

A successful entrepreneur is someone that can sell something that is not required. He creats a need for the thing he makes.

Good thing you winked!!!!

At BAC (Boeing Aerospace Company) i noticed that most of upper management had an engineering degree and an MBA. Entrepreneurs are a totally different story.

Ron

Simply put..... No.

An entrepreneur must have the abililty to say "this is good enough". An engineer agonizes over this point. Or should.

An Entrepreneur will gladly switch horses midstream to where the money will be.

Leaving unsolved issues to remain forever unsolved causes Engineers to lose sleep.

An entrepreneur is "someone who sees a need and fills it". It has to do with being perceptive enough to come up with a way to provide what a consumer wants. That "want" might be a service, intellectual property, a process of doing something, or it might be a physical good that is consumed. Anyone can do this if they have some right thinking to go with the perceived need, like a won't quit attitude, resources of funding, production, marketing, accounting, etc. One person can't do it all so they need to be willing to partner with others who are willing to risk the money, time, effort and emotional energy to bring a hopefully viable product/service to the market.

Anyone can be astute enough to carry through with this if they posess those kind of characteristics and are willing to persist long enough to see if the idea can survive. For some personality types it may be harder to persist in light of many times few positive results, but it can be done. An entrepreneur is more of a right mental attitude and toughness than personality type or a detailed way or thinking that characterizes many engineers (task/detail oriented; "ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, everything ready?, aim, aim, ok let's fire.")

If there are classes to help people think about having this perspective, that's great. The more people you have who have developed an innovative thinking process about how to approach different kinds of problems and meeting needs, the better off we are. That's where innovation comes from; "necessity is the mother of invention". Andrew Carnegie said "I would rather have a small percent of 100 mens efforts than a 100 percent of 1 mans effort." This kind of thinking is hard to come up with in a classroom setting though. It is something more caught than taught. Kids who grow up in an agricultural setting are many times great problem solvers.

Being a successful entrepreneur has a lot to do with recognizing opportunity and being prepared to take advantage of the situation. Providing engineers with the right tools in college will ensure more are prepared to take advantage of the opportunities presented to them in their careers . . . perhaps even being an entrepreneur.

rwb

Acromag

Acromag.com

Hmmm, interesting that schools are training engineers to be entrepreneurs (a.k.a. work for yourself) instead of training them to work for others. Maybe because the job market has been so terrible, and engineering careers so short?

A lot of successful engineering companies started in the 1950s through the 1970s were headed by engineers. Eventually those companies got taken over by businessmen, and ruined. An engineer is not automatically going to be able to start a successful business, but he often has the mindset to do it. He understands and cares about what it takes to deliver a technical product, which many businessmen do not.

I can only speak in generalities...no doubt there will be extraordinary individuals who can do it all...but we live in the age of the specialist. Everybody seems to be a specialist EXCEPT the entrepreneur. An entrepreneur will hire on anybody who she needs to do the job....if she needed a plumber, she hires on a plumber. If he needs an engineer, an engineer will be hired. When the job is done they are gonzo, and its on to the next project. And if a company is taken over by a business man and ruined...well...I think it is more likely that the seeds of collapse existed before the businessman got involved. If an engineer could have saved the company, the business owner who bought it would have hired one. The vast majority of companies go tits up within a few years of start up anyway, for a hundred reasons. When you hear of IPO's going under after sale, it is often because the new owners are not prepared to sacrifice their families with sixteen hour days and low wages just to make the company look attractive. The pointy haired boss of Dilbert fame is real of course, but not as prevalent as some seem to think!

Some people seem to think an entrepreneur is the same "trade" as a "business owner". Not so. A business owner is just a legal entity...some companies such as General Motors are owned by a collection of stock holders. They have not had an entrepreneur on staff for decades! The viability, marketing, profile and ultimate success of a business has nothing to do with the quality of the product an engineer is required by law and convention to create. If it did, fast food joints would collapse overnight!

Unlike some trades, you really can't have too many entrepreneurs.

If engineers who wish to be entrepreneurs then they should be taught following additional subjects:-

1.Financial Management.

2.Marketing Management.

3.Local Labour laws.

4.Local tax laws.

5.Export Procedures.

May be not be in depth but in brief so that they can manage their enterprise.

Does Financial Management include being able to make change for a dollar?

Be able to supervise the book keeper who is doing the monthly tax slips.....most businesses go under not because of the failure to do good work, but rather by the failure to manage the income and staff salaries.

A good entrepreneur is not just "an idea man". Like a cut jewel, a business has many facets. A good entrepreneur must be able to at least supervise and sign off on every single one of them. A good engineer is but one facet of that gem, no more important to the overall success of the business than the plumber in the bathroom, the electrician on the shop floor, or the guy who shovels snow off the parking lot.

The really smart ones do pretty well in high tech Silicon Valley. There are many businesses where the technology is so far out that you simply can't make a go of it without being well grounded in the fundamentals of that technology. Typically these folks are not one dimensional personalities.

I think the really smart engineers can benefit from a single 1 or 2 credit course on business management in their BS program. Just teach them the framework and they will be smart enough to learn the details on their own on the job. If they are not sharp enough to learn in a limited course then they have a low probability of success as an entrepreneur in today's competitive business environment. Any more coursework related to entrepreneurship than that one course will be a waste of everybody's time in a demanding engineering curriculum.

For a course outline I like the 5 areas suggested by suresh sharma for starters. To them I'd add some overviews of contract law, environmental regulations, product safety and industrial safety. Add the subject of business ownership up to and including public corporations and the nature of equities. Also add patent and copyright law and the role of business lawyers. I'd also throw in a class toward the end of the course covering the subject of manager, employee and customer human behavior in the commercial environment.

Ed Weldon (28 year veteran of the "Valley")

the order Depends on the business

you might have to start with

the subject of manager, employee and customer human behavior in the commercial environment

In order to have some balance

a couple of semesters in

TSOHK

The School Of Hard Knocks