An enterprise not only creates jobs for the entrepreneur but also generates opportunities for others, says Prof Raj Singh

During the last decade, universities have been accused of preparing graduates who are not employable since the education system in universities does not impart what is required by the industry or the client organisations. While one may question the integrity of such accusations, there seems to be a gap between what industry needs and what universities impart.

For any institution of higher education, the graduates have four pathways; securing a job with public or private organisations in India or abroad, starting own business or joining a family business (entrepreneurship), pursuing higher education in chosen areas and writing competitive examinations. Of the four, entrepreneurship is one such pathway, which not only employs the entrepreneur but also generates jobs for many others. The emphasis on entrepreneurship development also ensures that education involves developing business ideas around the latest trends with regard to technological advancements or business trends. Hence, the universities are now promoting entrepreneurship to overcome the job crisis, which they are accused of creating.

If one scans the horizon to understand the current landscape of start-ups in India, from 7000 start-ups in 2008, we reached 49,000 in 2018.

One of the ways of developing entrepreneurial temperament among students and teachers to create the desired eco-system is to conduct a start-up and incubation challenge involving teams of teachers and students as participants in the challenge and experts from venture development organisations, corporate and knowledge partners facilitating the entire process.  Such challenges typically involve the following process:

• Teams of faculty and students identify the problem
• The problem to be structured into a challenge for the students/faculty to work on through the development of a new venture
• Undertaking market research, development and use of a financial and business model to create a solution which solves the underlying problem
• Experts work with the teams to evaluate the progress
• The challenge may typically run for a year, and at the end of the year, evaluation and presentation are done to select a winner jointly by the institution/university
• The venture development organisations, depending upon the solution, can have the option to take the solution for commercialisation and get into an equity/royalty sharing with the winning team.

Such a course should be a mandatory part of the curriculum because this represents a pedagogical approach that will help institutions overcome the weak areas that the current education system is accused of having. It will also change the thinking of students to make it more contemporary and practical, and this thinking is extremely important for achieving higher-order learning outcomes.

The writer is Vice-chacellor, Ansal University