Author : Alvin, Azriana, Nor Hafiyzha, Nur Hadirah Munawwarah, Nur Aleeya Syakila
Advisor : Mr Hairudin Abdul Majid
JOHOR, June 2021 – Campus entrepreneurship programs provide training for students, faculty, researchers and business leaders to drive positive, disruptive change to society by building scalable enterprises. These programs teach entrepreneurial leadership, strategy, venture financing and startup skills. The focus of each program varies, from collaborations across disciplines to technology-enabled and socially responsible enterprises. An integral part is connecting participants to the vibrant startup ecosystem of a given UC campus, its local business community and the global network. Based on the observation that has been conducted, most of the local students do not have the drive or passion to push for success and run a business by themselves. From this point of view, we could say that most students have fostered that typical mindset towards starting up a business which makes it almost impossible for them to push their research or findings for commercialization as many give up owing to the mistaken beliefs.
UTM is very progressive in addressing the following problems. Therefore, to foster a mindset for business start ups, UTM used several supporting dimensions which include entrepreneurship programs. It is believed that this program could enhance the number of entrepreneurs among UTM students who are experts in branding, communications and have an aptitude for sales and business strategies. As we all know, there are several courses offered in this field such as Introduction To Entrepreneurship (UBSS1032/UHAK1032), Technopreneurship Seminar (SECD3761) and many more. In fact, UTM also encouraged the community to equally cultivate this mindset by providing various types of high education in this field including The Bachelor of Business Administration, Master of Science (Information Technology Entrepreneurship, MBA – Techno-entrepreneurship, MBA – Digital Entrepreneurship, Bachelor of Management (Marketing) etc.
Entrepreneurship courses are not the same as any other courses, it is not only teaching students ways to start off a business but at the same time,it is cultivating their mindset into a businessman. Most of the time, we mankind prefer overnight success more than failure. We wish we could maximise our profits, wealth in a very short amount of time. But in reality, unexpected things could happen anytime during the journey of entrepreneurship just like the recent covid19 pandemic, countless times of implementing movement control orders(MCO) since March of 2020 until now, yet we Malaysian people are still not seeing any possible sign of winning against the viruses. But as a consequence, MCO has caused a lot of small medium enterprise (SME) or even big listed companies suffer from the loss in revenue generated, financial crisis and the possibilities of bankruptcy. Entrepreneurship courses shall give every student a bigger perspective, or picture, to put themselves in a much higher position not only able to see the current things around them thus, it makes them see things clearer and further. In a single word, entrepreneurship makes them see long term prospects rather than focusing on short term volatility. Even though they are suffering at the beginning of the business,effort, money or even time they have spent doesn’t matter as long as they keep adapting to the latest environment, improving what they did badly, and the most important is having the correct mindset, they will eventually succeed at the end of the journey.
Most UTM students have risen to the challenge of setting up a business and have succeeded in their businesses. For example, HR Robotic, I Net Spatial, Sulaiman Plantation, Sigma 3D Makers and more. All of them have registered their company under UTM XCITE startup registration. Not to forget about Run Cloud Sdn Bhd, where it is a development tool for web developers to simplify the process of configuring, setting up cloud servers and deployment of web applications. It focuses on optimization, security and user experience to enable easy, hassle-free web server management and application deployment. This Run Cloud company was mentored by UTM XCITE ever since 2015. Arif Tukiman began his small company with his shareholders Amir Fazwan and Ahmad Fikrizaman during their undergraduate studies at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia’s Faculty of Computing (UTM). Many of their class work, as well as their final year projects, have been transformed into applications that are now used by many UTM societies. Not only that, they also received numerous UTM enterprise honours.
To sum up, we could see that this entrepreneurship programme is somehow important to people nowadays, especially the youth who are eager to start their own company. Thanks to UTM XCITE services that have helped the students in becoming entrepreneurs. In fact, they encouraged the students by doing a bunch of webinars to open up the community eyes on business benefits. We would like to give a big applause to Mr Hairudin Abdul Majid who has always been our advisor in doing such things from the start and never gives up in encouraging us, the students, to build up our own company.