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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

September - 2011 - issue > Anniversary Special

Few Simple Steps to Boost Entrepreneurship in India

Friday, September 2, 2011
The author is a Board Member and Chair, Programs, TiE Silicon Valley, TiE Angels Steering Committee Member and a serial entrepreneur based in San Francisco Bay Area.

Government officials, city officials and local communities across the across the world are recognizing that key to building prosperity and stimulate local growth is by fostering entrepreneurship among their people especially youth, which is the mantra of The Indus Entrepreneur (TiE) organization globally – “Fostering Entrepreneurship”. Here is an excellent quote from TiE Silicon Valley’s website: “TiE seeks to cultivate and nurture the ecosystem of entrepreneurship and free-market economies everywhere, as it sees this to be the single most powerful instrument of prosperity.”

The question is how do you foster entrepreneurship. I would like to focus more on simple steps that can be implemented without needing more resources on boosting entrepreneurial eco-system in India rather than the other components required for fostering entrepreneurship such as how to conceive an idea, writing a business plan, raising capital, creating a go-to-market and exit strategy for the startup company since there are plenty of resources available for that from venture capital websites, organizations like TiE , Kauffman Foundation, books on entrepreneurship and host of other readily available resources in internet. I as Chair, Programs, TiE Silicon Valley, continue to look at bringing out new programs for aspiring entrepreneurs and have incorporated some of the steps outlined below to enhance our program offerings since early this year. Now, what are these steps that can be taken? Some of them are:

1.Supporting Young Entrepreneurs – By 2015, World Bank estimates that there will be about 3 billion youths under 25 years old and a big portion of that will be in India. Now, with this step, this will not only help in reducing unemployment but more importantly showing young people that they have alternatives to create their own destiny by starting their own companies and just not waiting to find a job. It can be accomplished by offering classes around starting a business and bringing on successful entrepreneurs as role models to share their stories in those classes in these undergraduate colleges of engineering or business management courses. This will help in not only creating prosperity for student who chooses this path of being an entrepreneur, but also, inspire other employees of his or her organization and people from his community to start their own businesses and hence, creating the cycle of prosperity for the society.

2.Entrepreneurial Education – The number of engineering and business colleges including huge number of private colleges continue to increase in India even though we will still need many more than are currently existing there to support the youth population of India, which is a huge asset for India compared to other countries to reach its goals of being one of the top three global economic powerhouse in coming decades. Now, as mentioned in step one of Supporting Young Entrepreneurs, these colleges can begin offering classes in entrepreneurship with focus on providing practical education in conjunction with local industries. I remember very well, while studying at Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani, we had to go through two Practical Training programs with outside industry or government organizations in order to get our undergraduate degree. One was for a two-month duration after 2 years of being in college at Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS), Pilani, during summer and one for six-month duration in our last year of degree program, thereby giving us an excellent overview and exposure to the real world. Now in the similar fashion, entrepreneurship classes in the schools can be broken into two parts. The first part is to provide knowledge around building blocks of entrepreneurship and second part focuses on a business project, which will help teach important elements like how to form a team, how to write a business plan including resource requirements, go-to-market strategy and how to pitch to investors etc... Institutions like BITS, Pilani and host of others offer courses in Entrepreneurship. For instance, BITS, Pilani held their Tech Bazaar 2011 in March 2011, a convention to energize entrepreneurship among technical students and young scientists/innovators and has a full-fledged department called Entrepreneurship Development and Intellectual Property Rights Unit. Also, BITS alumni association has done a superb job of implementing BITS Embryo program which has talks every month on technology to business management to entrepreneurship and held via Skype video from experts from all over the world. Few years ago, I created and did a five talk series on Entrepreneurship covering all aspects of entrepreneurship from conceiving an idea to exit of a startup company to MBA and engineering students who were listening to these talks while sitting in their class room in Pilani, Rajasthan via skype video, while I was delivering it from here sitting in Silicon Valley. Hence, with very little investment, having talks from successful and accomplished entrepreneurs from anywhere in the world can serve not only inspiring but also, very insightful and educational to students sitting in colleges in India.


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