Surveying Entrepreneurship Orientation Through Teamwork Assignments: The Case of Kfupm Students

Abstract

With growing interest in self-employment, more and more of young people worldwide become aware and conscious that they can launch their own businesses and become self-employed. Across the Muslim and Arab world, important initiatives and policies make citizens and young people exposed to the world of business or entrepreneurship in different areas or disciplines. In the educational sector, a number of public and private universities and colleges in these countries have recently been engaged in offering entrepreneurship courses, training and offer facilities with the aim of attracting the attention and attendance of particularly people and graduates with innovative business ideas. Despite that entrepreneurship is for exploiting the intelligence and potentialities of male and female individuals, relevant educational courses and programs do emphasize the great importance of teamwork. The weight given to teamwork assignments very much expresses this importance, and business and entrepreneurship syllabuses and course grading systems usually stipulate that very clearly. This paper aims at exploring the orientation of King Fahd University (Kfupm) students towards the kind of business endeavors using end-of-semesters projects carried out during the period between 2004 and 2014 at the undergraduate level. Key findings are that Kfupm students collectively lean more towards services activities than industrial production ones, while by contracts, inventive and high-tech projects are very few. This suggests that the macro-economic prevailing context does matter, as trade has long been the dominant economic activity in Saudi Arabia. An important implication for decision-makers and educators is to find ways of enhancing innovation-based entrepreneurship education and training more effectively.