How entrepreneurship influences an engineering faculty at a newly formed university of technology

South Africa (SA) has an unemployment rate of 30-40% and especially in Engineering, new employment opportunities are critically needed. Existing higher education channels do not cater for the addition of Entrepreneurship to allow students this option. The Cape Peninsula University of Technology came into being in January 2005 through the merging of two former institutions, and the re-organising of the Engineering Faculty thus presented an opportunity to include a strategic new emphasis on entrepreneurship. This research proposes that if a concerted effort is made to expose engineers to an environment conducive to entrepreneurship, then universities of technology could contribute to the SA economy by producing innovative engineers who can create wealth and jobs for themselves and other South Africans. In a situation of proposed change such as this, it is encouraging to note that Moss-Kanter (1983) asserts that change is constant, and that only the degree of change is variable. Wheatley (1992) agrees that one needs to adopt radical steps to properly mobilise entrepreneurship. Bygrave and Hofer (1991) focus on the entrepreneur as the centre of entrepreneurship, and by implication in this context, not the engineer. Moss-Kanter (1983) adds that engineers need to 'leapfrog' their thinking and realise that by nature they are also capitalist, and thus inherently entrepreneurial to some degree. Shaver & Scott's work (1991) points to Mischel (1968) who views behaviour as a function of both person and environment. By extension, the engineer-entrepreneur can therefore be modelled as an integrated person-environment pair. All of these sources therefore confirm that a stronger sense of entrepreneurship is more than appropriate among the engineering fraternity.