Entrepreneurship affords people the opportunity to follow their passion and serves as a solid foundation for employment creation and industrial development. This course aims to expose the student to start developing entrepreneurial mindsets so that they can begin to explore their entrepreneurial desires and potentials. The important elements of the course include ideation and opportunity recognition, feasibility analysis, analysis of legal forms of business ownership, protecting start-up assets, and the role of ethics and social responsibility in small businesses. The course, therefore, focuses on building entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviours that will lead to creative solutions within the community and organisational environments.

This course is divided into 2 parts. The first part provides learners with essential skills to become business leaders with a sound understanding of the fundamentals of management and various aspects of management practices and consequently enables them to understand and control organizational growth both as employees and owners of entities.  The important elements of the first part of this course include management functions of planning, organising, leading, and controlling as well as decision making. The second part focuses on building learners’ entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviours that will lead to creative solutions within the community and organisational environments. This part covers identification of the characteristics, opportunities, and challenges for different entrepreneurial profiles; ideation and opportunity recognition; feasibility analysis; different legal forms of business ownership, and ways to finance businesses.

The failure of projects in both the public and private sectors is partly attributed to the lack of project management knowledge and skills. Considering this understanding, equipping students with project management skills becomes critical. This course seeks to equip students with project knowledge and skills that enable them to manage projects. The course covers the project life cycle, the roles and responsibilities of project teams, project quality management, scheduling of project activities, project risk management, and project appraisal and investment analysis.

This course enables learners to have a good grasp of entrepreneurial and management knowledge and industry needed skills required to tackle the industry challenges and hopefully enable them to create sustainable businesses and/or run the same as employees. This course is divided into three sections. The first section – Starting a Business - introduces students to entrepreneurship and equips them with market research skills and the underpinning knowledge required to start and operate their own business. The second section of the course - Sustaining a Business - equips learners with basic book-keeping skills. Book-keeping involves the recording of monetary transactions, appropriately classified, in the financial records of an entity or business. Learners should demonstrate the ability to record transactions in the books of prime entry, perform double-entry book-keeping, carry out a trial balance, and prepare final accounts.

This course introduces students to entrepreneurship, basic economics, and engineering economic analysis. Students will be provided with underpinning knowledge necessary to explain the nature and role of entrepreneurial activities in Botswana, explain reasons why individuals engage in entrepreneurship and identify the benefits of engaging in entrepreneurial activities for an individual and the country. Furthermore, students will also be exposed to the reasons for the success and failure of small businesses in Botswana. Students will also be introduced to the basic economic concepts and principles in which they should be able to distinguish between macroeconomics and microeconomics, describe the economic problem, and use the production possibility frontier to explain the concepts of scarcity, choice, and opportunity cost. The principles of demand, supply, and price-setting will be explored. Engineering economic analysis examines the money spent at the design and building stages of a project, and the revenues and benefits generated during and after project completion. Students will be equipped with skills to determine the economic feasibility of engineering projects.

The survival and growth of a business are products of implementing a well-designed business plan. It is therefore important that entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs be equipped with the skills of developing an implementable business plan. This course is offered to equip students with the skills of developing a strategic business plan that leads to entrepreneurial success. The business plan development covers conducting a SWOT analysis, developing an operational plan, developing a management plan, developing a marketing plan, and developing a financial plan. Students combine the different components of a business plan to form a comprehensive and strategic business plan that is relevant to their areas of specialisation.

The course focuses on the core activities of innovation, commercialization, entrepreneurial processes, and intellectual property rights. These include, but are not limited to issues such as contextualization, collaboration, knowledge sharing, new product development, innovative organization, internationalization, project management, and property rights.  The course starts with an introduction to technology, commercialization, entrepreneurship, and intellectual property rights. Next, it analyzes issues to do with licensing intellectual property; technology transfer; idea validation, and Technology Business Models. Lastly, the course focuses on Technology and Product Valuation, and Strategizing Commercialization and Entrepreneurial Networks. This course thus seeks to provide learners with an understanding of a range of issues and practices that have relevance for managing technological and scientific innovation and the entrepreneurial skills required to commercialise new products within the legal framework of intellectual property rights.

This module emphasises the relationships among organizational theory, organizational design, and organizational change. It will provide you with an account of how today’s changing environment, including technological forces, affects the way managers design and change an organization’s structure to increase organizational effectiveness. You will examine how to manage the organizational life cycle and respond to various problems. You will also examine the institutional theory of growth and Greiner’s model of growth, and Weitzel and Jonsson’s model of organizational decline.  The key element in this module includes issues related to the vertical dimension of structure, models of decision making; forces for change, the resistance to change, the revolutionary and evolutionary approaches to change; and managing conflict, power, and politics within the organisation.

This course introduces students to the essential concepts and skills needed to grow and manage a business successfully by equipping learners with skills to effectively manage the resources of a growing business venture: financial, physical, human, and technological. The course starts by focusing on strategic planning for business growth and exploiting global business opportunities. Next, the course exposes learners to strategies relating to managing the internal growth in all resource areas: product development, marketing, and financial growth. The final part of the course analyses supply chain management, managing risks, business valuation, and how to harvest a venture.

The course introduces students to risk management in STEM projects and what it is like to be innovative in risk management. The course comprehensively covers identification of risks; measurement of risks; and innovative management of risks. Learners will get to practice their skills through participation in simple project risk management using appropriate software. The course should give students a wider identification of different risk management strategies in STEM projects. By the end of the course, students should have a clearer idea of risk management and what it takes to be a successful risk manager.

This course emphasises leadership development through various methods. Rather than studying leadership as an object, students will consider themselves as subjects of leadership development. Learners will be introduced to the philosophy of leadership and how that philosophy informs leadership style. The authoritarian, democratic, and laissez-faire styles will be examined. In addition, learners are introduced to the three categories of leadership skills - administrative, interpersonal, and conceptual. The course also emphasises the importance of values and ethics as well as the social and institutional context in which leadership takes place. Learners should be able to explain how the leader’s ethics direct his actions and use the five bases of power to explain power’s effect on a leader’s ethics.

In our contemporary society, technology has been viewed as a key driving force of societal change and social transformation. This course provides a critical examination of the complex interrelationship between society and technology. The learner will be exposed to the intersection of technology and society as well as various theoretical perspectives on technology. Moreover, by taking this course, the learner will develop skills sufficiently to analyze, evaluate and discuss emerging issues relating to society and various technological innovations. The important themes covered in this course include sociological perspectives on technology, technology, mediated social relationships, and technological innovation and social change in the context of Africa.

Engineers play a central role in various societal developments.  Engineers’ knowledge and skills are used to carry out a variety of specific functions that solve the needs of society, particularly in the area of economy and business. Understanding the role of engineering in society and the economic and business feasibility of engineering is therefore central to the training of contemporary engineers.  This course provides the learner with an understanding of how engineering affects society, how engineering companies operate in a competitive business environment, and how networking, communication, planning, and management are central in engineering business development. The course is organised around three (3) important themes: 1) Engineering and its impact on society; 2) Business feasibility of engineering; and 3) Engineering, network, and business management.

Engineers play a central role in various societal developments.  Engineers’ knowledge and skills are used to carry out a variety of specific functions that solve the needs of society, particularly in the area of economy and business. Understanding the role of engineering in society and the economic and business feasibility of engineering is therefore central to the training of contemporary engineers.  This course provides the learner with an understanding of how engineering affects society, how engineering companies operate in a competitive business environment, and how networking, communication, planning, and management are central in engineering business development. The course is organised around three (3) important themes: 1) Engineering and its impact on society; 2) Business feasibility of engineering; and 3) Engineering, network, and business management.