Challenges and Prospects of Entrepreneurship in Bhutan from the Lens of Business Educators

Abstract

Entrepreneurship plays an important role in generating employment opportunities, enhancing public income and promoting societal change, particularly in a budding economy like Bhutan. Given its importance to the country, this paper investigates the challenges faced by aspiring entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ventures, and their future prospects in Bhutan. The paper adopts qualitative research methodology to study the perspective of business educators through a semi-structured interview with fifteen participants from Gedu College of Business Studies located at Gedu, Bhutan. The study reveals that, due to a range of challenges the aspiring entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial ventures face today, the Bhutanese entrepreneurs have a long way to go before they can effectively drive changes in the economy. However, the findings suggest that there is a good prospect for the entrepreneurial ventures in the country, and the ventures will have an undue advantage if it can leverage on the technological support from other countries. To ease the way for entrepreneurs in the country, the study finds it important to encourage the consumption of indigenous products by discouraging the import of the goods and services that can be produced within the country, regulate the price of the home made product, explore market and marketing facilities beyond the country to encourage large scale production, initiate discussion about entrepreneurship and the associated benefits at school levels and also take adequate infrastructural facilities (water, electricity and transportation network) across all parts of the country.