The engineering side produces entrepreneurs as well, but with a somewhat different culture, with more of a focus on R&D inputs. The style is less of the Silicon

The engineering side produces entrepreneurs as well, but with a somewhat different culture, with more of a focus on R&D inputs. The style is less of the Silicon Valley one of: go to a hackathon, brainstorm ideas that can be built with <48 hours of R&D, built an MVP over the weekend. There's a bigger focus on finding a nice chunk of uncommercialized but commercial-potential research that could be spun off into a company. The other common non-big-company route is independent consultant. Lots of engineering alumni run profitable small consulting firms, which seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. However it's usually easier to do that if you work somewhere "in the trenches" for a few years first to build up credibility.