Awareness about entrepreneurship courses is low, but that has not stopped many top institutions from launching them
Even while Mitesh Thakker was doing his MBA from SP Jain Institute of Management and Research, his heart was not into joining the corporate bandwagon. Instead, he wanted to set up a dotcom in true entrepreneurial style.
“I always wanted to start my own business. I was so keen on doing it that I did not even participate in the campus placements.” says Mitesh, founder and director of NetPrice Services, a firm that helps large brands in checking the performance of their advertising spend.
However, his company NetPrice is not his first venture. “My first company, which I started around 1999-2000, did not survive the bubble burst and soon I started having second thoughts. I started feeling that if I had taken those placements, my salary would have been much more than the total revenues of my company,” he says about his tryst with entrepreneurship.Mitesh soon found himself a job, but he still yearned to be his own master. “There was this idea of NetPrice Services in my mind, but I was full of doubts due to the past failure,” he remembers.
It was then, in August 2006, that he received a mail from his alma mater, informing him about a new program for those who wanted to start their own businesses. The program, not surprisingly, was called Start Your
Own Business.
“I wanted answers to questions like, should I work on my idea, or am I good with my present employer? What returns will it give? From the brochure, it looked like I would get my answers. The course would not only whet my ideas, but also provide some coaching on what to do at every milestone,” shares Mitesh.
There are many people today who, like Mitesh, have a vision or an idea to launch their own businesses. However, unlike Mitesh, they may not have to burn their fingers the first time, as there are a quite a few courses on entrepreneurship being offered now.
| NEN’s membership growth | ||||||||||
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| *Targets: Mar ’09 – 450 institutes Current total student body: ~350,000 Students actively engaged in entrepreneurship programs (March ‘08): 55,000 |
The courses
Besides SP Jain Institute, many of India’s top institutions offer entrepreneurial courses today (see box). Some examples are IIM-A, IIM-B and Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India (EDI).
Most of these programs require the candidate to have basic graduation, though in some, non-graduates can also apply. Sometimes, passion and commitment are all that the institutes look for when evaluating prospective students.
“Entrepreneurship is kind of a holistic subject, it’s a portfolio of knowledge,” says Prof K Kumar, who teaches entrepreneurship-related courses at IIM Bangalore. “It offers two components—one is the business component and the other one is the entrepreneurship component. The business component acts as a safety net for those students who might not feel like starting their own ventures immediately, and the entrepreneurship component is the inspirational net that is going to instill passion and skills. So, if you are an entrepreneur who comes from an accounting background, you’ll probably spend more time in understanding human resources and marketing and if you are coming from a marketing background, you’ll spend more time understanding finance and the business of managing money. You have to pick and choose from the portfolio that is offered to you.”
In some cases, like that of the family managed business (FMB) programs, there are additional criteria like the applicant should have a role in a family business and should have spent some time understanding it. Thanks to the low-level of awareness about such courses, many institutes don’t feel the need for an entrance test either.
Still early years
Entrepreneurship education in India is in its early stages. It has just grabbed a toehold in the country, and though gradually the number of institutes introducing entrepreneurship programs is increasing, the awareness is quite low. Most of the participants in these courses are either the alumni of these institutes or got to know of them by word-of-mouth.
Even those who turn up for many of these courses, especially the more popular family business programs, are not the usual entrepreneurs. As Suresh Rao, a professor at SP Jain, points out, “There are two kinds of people who join this program. One is the next generation of traditional business families that want to start new businesses and not stick to their traditional businesses. But then, they are very cocooned. By and large they are not entrepreneurial-minded and are not even entrepreneurs at that stage. They are conditioned and influenced by their elders. The second class is comprised of those who have no business background.”
Entrepreneurial education in India is in stark contrast to the West, where entrepreneurial courses are well established. “In countries like US, entrepreneurship education has been part of regular academics for about the past 20 years. It’s very well established in biz schools, engineering colleges, arts and science colleges. This is not the case in India,” says Laura Parkin, executive director of National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN), an organization that promotes entrepreneur values in the country. “In India, there has been a single course offering in the university system focusing more on self-employment than on innovation-based entrepreneurship,” she says.
However, Parkin can feel a change in the atmosphere. “During the last five years, we have been able to see a great hunger for this kind of education among the young people,” she says, pointing out that NEN has around 3.5 lac student members spread over 373 institutes.
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