Entrepreneurial Revolution :: Business, Entrepreneurs

Kuratko and Hodgetts (2001) mentioned that â€Å"we are having entrepreneurial revolution in this twenty first century†. This is the period where entrepreneurs will grow like mushroom after the raining season. On the other hand in Malaysia, according to department of statistic (2009) the number of people who become entrepreneurs have shown a reducing trend since 1982 to 2008 where it had gone down to 20.9% from 25.1%. This shows that many people prefer to work with private sector or government rather than becoming entrepreneurs. To increase the number of the people to become entrepreneurs especially the Bumiputra(native people), the government has launched many schemes and mechanism to increase their numbers. Education institution has been use as one of the mechanism to promote entrepreneurship to the student in middle and tertiary education. The creations of entrepreneurs are important because they have been proven to contribute to economy wealth and job creation (Turker and Selcuk, 2008). In 1999, Audretsh and Thurik conducted research on past data from 1984 to 1994 regarding the relationship between entrepreneur and job creation issue. The result showed that there is a positive relationship between the two where the number of job rate increases when the number of entrepreneurs increased. In Malaysia entrepreneurship course was started to be introduced in some universities in mid 90’s (Cheng et al.d, 2010). Then in 2007, Ministry of Higher Education made a policy that entrepreneurship course became a compulsory subject to all students in the universities irrespective of whatever faculties ,to encouraged more development of entrepreneurs from the university(Ministry of High Education Malaysia, report 2010). With this policy, universities have become the center to foster entrepreneurship. However unlike the situation in the west, here in Malaysia the situation is different where the number of people who actually become entrepreneur is small compared to the number of people who have taken the course. This is totally difference in other countries. In the United States, for instance, many of the graduates form companies after and during their universities. In the west the impact of the entrepreneurship education have been well known as mention by Ayers (2004) where the â€Å"graduates from Massachuset Institute of Technology have created more than 4000 companies†. In Harvard more than 50% of the students have involved in venture business (Anjan,2005). Similar effect also ha d happen in early research in Europe (Harhoff, 1999) .All these situations indicate that entrepreneurship can be taught through education.