Significance of Elating the Entrepreneurial Initiatives through Education among MBA Students

Starting from a century ago, everyone has seen a number of “waves” in entrepreneurship education, developing into many phases and now expanding exponentially. By making entrepreneurship education available to young people and adults, each and everyone have to prepare the next wave of entrepreneurs to enable, to lead and shape the firms. The time to act is now and it is time to more adequately develop entrepreneurial skills, attitudes and behaviors in our school and college systems.<br><br>This study was undertaken in Erode District, covering all8 constituencies and 6 taluks. Each and every stage of the research has been explained briefly for which Descriptive Research Design was adopted. The MBA students of all the colleges in various parts of Erode District during the period of October 2013 – March 2014 was taken as sample. About 750 students were identified and surveyed using Simple Random Sampling Technique. For the study, both primary and secondary data were collected. Structured questionnaires and interviews were used to collect the primary data.


"Entrepreneurship is an incredible force. It is the engine of growth, jobs and opportunity and deserved to be celebrated"
Entrepreneurship has never been more important than it is today in this time of financial crisis. However, a considerable agreement exists to stress the role of promoting entrepreneurial initiatives through education among the students, to stimulate the economic development and employment generation. The entrepreneurship education, as an initiative, can equip people to proactively pursue those opportunities available to them based on their local environments and cultures. So it is been considered that the entrepreneurial initiative can be imparted to students through their education.

ENTREPRENEUR & ENTREPRENEURSHIP
There has been a great deal of attention paid to the subject of entrepreneurship over the past few years, stemming primarily from the discovery by economic analysts and involves the development of a business from the ground up and turning it into a profitable business. The definitions are quoted below: ➢ According to America Heritage dictionary: "Entrepreneur is a person who organizes, operates and assumes the risk for business venture" ➢ According to Dr. Joseph A. Schumpeter: "Nobody is an entrepreneur all the time; one behaves as an entrepreneur only when carrying out innovations".
He defines the concept as: ➢ "Entrepreneurship is the journey of opportunity exploration and risk management to create value for profit and/or social good" -Ajay Bam (Berkeley's Haas School of Business)

NEED FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION:
Entrepreneurship Education is the one which seeks to provide students with the knowledge, skills and motivation to encourage entrepreneurial success in a variety of settings. Nowadays entrepreneurship education is been offered at all levels of schooling from primary or secondary schools to university programs. Added the National Standards for Entrepreneurship Education were also developed to prepare youth and adults to succeed in an entrepreneurial economy.

OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY:
1. To analyze the various skills and knowledge possessed by the MBA students towards entrepreneurship. 2. To determine the factors that triggers the students towards Entrepreneurship. 3. To ascertain the role of Entrepreneurship Education in initiating entrepreneurial thoughts.

REVIEW OF LITERATURE:
1. Ernest Samwel Mwasalwiba, (2010) aimed to take stock of existing publications devoted to entrepreneurship education and assessed the alignment existing between its generic objectives, target audience, teaching methods and impact indicators. A semi-systematic literature review is applied; using six thematically separated excel data collection spreadsheets. A total of 108 articles are reviewed. It was found that scholars in this field of study, though differing in a number of definitive issues, are converging towards a single framework of entrepreneurship education and accepted that there is a shift from a start-up view to an attitude-changing perspective of entrepreneurship education. It was also noted that there is still a non-alignment between what educators and other stakeholders wish to achieve in educating for entrepreneurship with the applied pedagogical approaches, and success indicators. 4. Alistair R. Anderson (2011) reviewed the existing literature and conceptual developments to explore how and why universities should teach entrepreneurship. The paper largely synthesizes existing work, but conceptualizes and presents the material in a new way, which draws on the rich seam of existing literature to develop theory about enterprise education purpose and pedagogy. The paper raises awareness of the importance of the university's role for developing the right sort of entrepreneurship. It also highlights important pedagogic points that will realize the full potential of a university entrepreneurial education. The findings reported that the Universities are uniquely able to provide the right sort of education that will produce "better" entrepreneurs. In turn, these better entrepreneurs are better enabled to produce and successfully implement the innovation that drives economic growth.

ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION:
The data collected have been organized, classified and analyzed using a wide range of appropriate statistical tools like Mean Analysis, Chi-Square, Henry Garrett Ranking Technique, to attain the objectives of the study.

I. HENRY GARRETT RANKING TECHNIQUE a) Ranking the entrepreneurship knowledge from the perception of students:
An attempt has been made to know the importance for entrepreneurship related skills and knowledge. For the purpose of this study, it has been classified into the following ten categories. The respondents were asked to rank these entrepreneurial skills and knowledge in the order of their importance. To identify the most important factor, Henry Garrett Ranking Technique was employed and the details of ranking the importance for entrepreneurship related to skills and knowledge are shown in the following table. seek opportunities are prior important for entrepreneurship related knowledge.

b) Ranking the entrepreneurship skills from the perception of students:
An attempt has been made to know the survival skills of entrepreneur. For the purpose of this study, it has been classified into the below seven categories. The respondents were asked to rank these survival skills of entrepreneur in the order of their importance, for which Henry Garrett Ranking Technique was employed.

a) Factors motivating the respondents towards Entrepreneurship:
An attempt has been made to know the sources that motivated the students towards entrepreneurship.

III. CHI-SQUARE TEST b) Factors motivating entrepreneurship and contributions of the existing educational system:
With a view to find the degree of association between factors motivating entrepreneurship of the respondents and contributions of the existing educational system, a two-way table is prepared and is exhibited as follows. It is found from the above table that the high level of contributions of the existing educational system was the highest (34.6%) among the students who motivated by their dreams and desires and the same was the lowest (17.5%) among the students who motivated by their fellow students. The percentage of medium level of contributions of the existing educational system was the highest (55.0%) among the students who motivated by their fellow students and the lowest (30.2%) among the students who motivated by their dreams and desires. On the other hand, the percentage of low level of contributions of the existing educational system was the highest (35.2%) among the students who motivated by their Further, it is found that MBA students have attained maximum (17.5) level of contributions of the existing educational system among the students who motivated by their dreams and desires.
In order to find the relationship between motivation to be an entrepreneurship and contributions of the existing educational system, a hypothesis has been formulated and tested by using chi-square test and the results are discussed in the following table.
H0 : There is no significant relationship between motivation to be an entrepreneurship of the respondents and contributions of the existing educational system. H1 : There is a close significant relationship between motivation to be an entrepreneurship of the respondents and contributions of the existing educational system.  It is stated from the above table that the respondents have strongly agreed that the contributions of the existing educational system towards entrepreneurship development; stimulates the personality changes such as development of risk taking ability and self management as 31.5 and 40.8 percent respectively. On the other hand, the respondents have agreed towards the personality changes like fostering the entrepreneurial spirit, encouraging innovative thoughts, developing self efficacy, behavioural changes, attitudinal changes, developing ethical and traditional values as 40.7, 47.3, 41.1, 35.9, 39.9 and 34.4 percent respectively. It is found from the analysis that the majority (47.3%) of the respondents agreed that; encouraging innovative thoughts among the students, stimulate the entrepreneurship development which should be the prime contribution of the existing educational system.

b) Teaching initiatives that encourages the entrepreneurial spirit
An attempt has been made to know the opinion of the respondents regarding teaching initiatives that encourages the entrepreneurial spirit among the students, for which it has been classified into the following five categories.