Entrepreneurship and B-schools defining

innovation
12 Apr 2008, 2000 hrs IST, Abhijit Bhattacharya,

Currently entrepreneurship is a buzzword in many Indian business schools with popular

press further fuelling the public excitement by frequently reporting on maverick students
spurning mind-boggling salary packages to launch their bootstrapped ventures. But despite
all the hullabaloo, in reality every year only a minuscule number of students actually show
the courage and determination to take the plunge to start an independent entrepreneurial
career on completion of their MBA programme.

Sporadic reports have been also appearing about entrepreneurs launching their own
ventures after several years of post-MBA employment, though it is not yet a discernible
trend. For the overwhelming majority of students a degree in business administration still
holds the promise of comfy jobs for which seemingly they do not require to demonstrate any
risk-taking appetite of an entrepreneur.

In today’s hypercompetitive market many of the prospective young managers will soon
realise that their scope for further career progress depends not necessarily on their
analytical and administrative skills to manage uncertainty through various innovative risk-
hedging initiatives (all such initiatives basically reflect the conservative or risk-averse
attitude of a manager), but also on their ability to take entrepreneurial risks to fully exploit
the risk potential of an uncertain situation. Sometimes a manager can even get into an
unenviable situation when the company will expect from them to demonstrate their
entrepreneurial attributes without the required freedom of an entrepreneur or protection
from reprisal in case of a failure.

In past, such attitude of firms had led to the collapse of a few famous corporate venturing
initiatives. For example, Eastman Kodak which had produced about a dozen ventures in the
1980s under its specially formed New Opportunity Development Unit had ultimately decided
to abandon the initiative a decade later to concentrate on its core business. The event
prompted a Wall Street Journal reporter to even conclude that a go-go small business culture
driven by entrepreneurial spirit couldn’t be integrated into a corporate giant.

With extremely high rates of technology as well as product obsolescence, firms these days
are getting caught between creativity and ‘conveyorability’, between exploration and
exploitation. To survive, the organisations now have hardly any option but to demonstrate
their entrepreneurial flexibility and explore opportunities in complimentary knowledge
domains

and come up with innovative products and services. In such a scenario, only a manager with
an entrepreneurial mindset can provide the required agility to the organisation and promote
a culture of innovation. In their seminal work on organisational growth, Nonaka and Takeuchi
described how the behaviour of the managers, particularly at the middle level, encouraged
employees to take entrepreneurial risks without fearing for their jobs or reputations and
build value-creating organisations.

The growing need for creating entrepreneurially-oriented corporate managers has its
obvious implications for our B-schools. Also, when so much of investments are being made
for establishing incubators to create high growth startups in various B-schools, it is
important that the students grasp the impact of high growth over a time period on
entrepreneurial quality of the decision-making processes in such organisations.

Historically, the business schools were primarily created to cater to large organisations and
staffed with experts to focus on functional approaches. The managers trained by these
schools generally treated new knowledge generation and innovation as activity of
specialised areas such as, finance, marketing, etc. The governance structure of the firms
with rigid hierarchies and clearly defined boundaries further contributed to convert many of
the managers to risk averse corporate bureaucrats whose primary concern was to make
decisions logically explainable and justifiable to the investors. In such a firm, gut feel and
entrepreneurial instincts did not command any premium. Anecdotal evidence suggests that
dependence on gut feel even carried the risk of getting stamped as managerially
incompetent.

Since firms are now operating in a networked environment where functional and
administrative barriers are fast disappearing within the organisations, on the one hand it
appears that there is more room for entrepreneurial decision making. But on the other hand,
in a supervolatile marketplace with ever shortening time for decision making,
entrepreneurship in many cases has actually become the victim. This is primarily due to
managers’ reluctance to get involved in time consuming exploratory thinking and their
desire to rely on familiar algorithms to identify possible outcomes some of which actually
belong to outside the range of typical thinking. Such managers cannot create winners.

To remain competitive an organisation has to have managers at all levels who have the
confidence to use their entrepreneurial intuition gained through exploratory thinking in
combination with sound managerial logic based on explicit knowledge. Only managers with
high risk-taking propensity and smart risk-hedging ability will ultimately define the growth
potential of the new age organisations.

To develop the entrepreneurial skills among the MBA students, learning in the B-schools has
to partly take place in an enterprising mode. Involvement in the actual entrepreneurial
decision-making process as a stakeholder is central to acquire such skills. With rapid growth
of artificial intelligence which allows a decision maker to select satisfactory alternatives
instead of searching for an optimal solution, entrepreneurship can be taught more
effectively using computer simulations.

But for an entrepreneur to get quality data input and to arrive at quality solutions from
simulations is still a problem. Probably nothing can still replace the tacit entrepreneurial
knowledge derived from actual involvement in the business development process. Students’
involvement as mentors for small firms as well as setting up student-driven businesses
through incubation facilities in the campuses, if properly integrated with the core curriculum,
may present a few alternatives that can provide an opportunity to hone the entrepreneurial
skills of our future managers.

(The author is professor of entrepreneurship, Institute of Management, Nirma

University)

How business schools groom future business

leaders
28 Apr 2009, 0219 hrs IST, Priya C Nair, ET Bureau

Grooming entrepreneurs
“The current economic crisis has led to the emergence of several start-up firms. Many
entrepreneurs feel that the time now is right to initiate new ventures as enthusiasts have
the time to think about innovations and even, evaluate the viability of it further,” says Prof K
Kumar, chairperson, N S Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Studies (NSRCEL) at Indian
Institute of Management Bangalore.

NSRCEL was started with a vision to seed, nurture and promote entrepreneurship with
emphasis on start-ups and existing organisations with growth potential. The centre takes up
ventures based on the novelty of ideas, innovation, ability of the team/entrepreneur to build
the business, etc. And the ideas are screened by a panel of industry experts, venture
capitalists, etc. Soon after the review, an entrepreneur can start working on the idea.

“The centre supports budding entrepreneurs by providing them with the essential
infrastructure to get the idea evaluated, up and running. This includes allocation of cubicle
space with computers and internet access, provision of facilities like photocopying, facsimile
and telephone, access to the IIMB library and even access to expert advice and various
external forums,” says Kumar.

“The infrastructure is essential to maintain efficiency of the team; however, the mentorship
component for a
company like NextGen is equally essential where the average age of the team is 21 who are
also currently pursuing their under graduation engineering courses. We are novices in the
business world and at NSRCEL, we have professors whom we can approach and discuss our
business strategy anytime with,” feels Abhishek Humbad, a BITS-Pilani student and an
incubatee at NSRCEL who works on an energy and environment start-up (NextGen PMS Pvt.
Ltd) that helps companies across the entire green chain right from estimating their carbon
footprints, benchmarking it to providing energy efficiency solutions to reduce it.

“Simple things like time sheets, making proposals, making the right quotes, pricing, signing
the right MOUs, building and training the best team, etc. are very essential and critical for a
start-up’s existence and success and NSRCEL offers just that to us,” explains Humbad. A
start-up venture can be in the IIMB campus for about 18 months.

“Once the evaluated idea is built, tried and tested in local environments, NSRCEL will help
the entrepreneur to network externally to take the fledgling business to the next phase of
growth. The external parties could be venture capitalists, companies, industry experts and
others,” says Kumar. “The cell also helps in bringing in investments from outside,” informs
Kumar. According to Kumar, business schools must encourage entrepreneurs and must build
in the value system that a start-up is also a great career option.

Nurturing entrepreneurs

The Wadhwani Centre for Entrepreneurship Development at Indian School of Business (ISB),
Hyderabad has started the ‘entrepreneurship development’ initiative this year to nurture
entrepreneurship among its students.

“There have been initiatives to encourage entrepreneurship in the past. We have realised
the limitations of such initiatives and now, we are trying to revitalise our role in promoting
entrepreneurship. We are taking a strategic view of what it takes to be a successful
entrepreneur and the kind of ecosystem and mentoring framework required for becoming
successful,” says Dr Krishna Tanuku, executive director, Wadhwani Centre for
Entrepreneurship Development, ISB about the reasons for starting up the initiative.

“ISB is encouraging ventures that have a significant social impact, which are self sustainable
and more importantly, scalable over a period of time. We have taken about nine ventures of
our students and our aim is to make them investment ready,” explains Tanuku.

ISB provides the entrepreneurs facility to stay in the campus, sustenance allowance, linkage
to investment community and intellectual support like rigorous mentoring and guidance of
the faculty members. “The entrepreneurs are full-time at the ISB campus and their main job
is to make their ventures successful; the rest is taken care by the institute. This brings in a
lot of energy and focus into the venture,” believes Tanuku.

According to Deepesh Agarwal, founder of a start up GoCars and a management student at

ISB, it is definitely an advantage for a start-up to be associated with a B-school. “At a B-
school, you frequently get to meet people with diverse backgrounds, varied experiences and
people who have been through this journey before. You get a lot of good advice and a lot of
new ideas on solving problems of your own enterprise. You stay in constant touch with the
VC community which is yet another advantage,” explains Agarwal.

Such initiatives are providing excellent platforms to budding entrepreneurs by giving the
much required support, mentoring and financial assistance thus realising their dreams into a
reality.

B-schools tailor courses to meet demand for

offbeat jobs
6 Aug 2008, 0000 hrs IST, Shreya Biswas, ET Bureau
NEW DELHI: India’s rapidly-growing economy is throwing up demand for new skill sets. And
educational institutes are introducing niche and unheard of courses to meet industry
demand.

Some of these are — Tata Institute of Social Sciences’ (TISS) PG degree (MA) in social
entrepreneurship, JK Business School’s MBA in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and
Indian Clinical Research Institute’s (ICRI) management course in medical tourism to Amity’s
MSc in organic agriculture and Welingkars’ course in judiciary management. Two years ago,
a buoyant clinical trial and pharma industry saw an introduction of a degree course in
clinical trial.

Take the case of social entrepreneurship. Sensing a trend, both globally and in India, TISS
launched a two-year course that aims at training and developing leaders for wealth
generation with social progress in social sectors and non-profit organisations.

Amity’s organic agriculture course, launched two months ago, has many takers. Two years
ago, it launched an MBA in organic management and buoyed by its success it launched an
MSc programme two months back. “There is a huge demand for professionals in this field,”
says Amity University’s Savita Mehta.
JK Business School, which was launched in 2006, is running a course on CSR since last year.
It’s a CII-JK business school initiative where students learn about CSR and work with
companies specially SMEs, to sort out their problems.

This year, students will work with 25 such companies including Sona Koyo Steering, Jindal
Steel, Sahara India, Munjal Showa and JK Technosoft. “Companies in the SME segment often
confuse CSR with merely spending money in social projects and there have been issues with
carrying out such efforts even when they want to do it,” says J K Business School director
general Reena Ramachandran. “This initiative will help our students in understanding the
space as well as support the companies.”

Welingkar Institute of Management, Mumbai, plans to roll out a diploma programme in

judiciary management soon. ICRI recently launched a full-fledged course on medical tourism,
besides inpatient services & ward management. “There is a great demand for such modules
as the manpower requirement goes up and the need for specialised roles arise.” says ICRI
health service director Major General M Srivastava.

This could just be a beginning. As emerging new sectors throw up new challenges, India Inc
would look for relevant skills to meet them. And there in lies opportunities for educational
institutes.

IMI-NEN intensive program completed

28 Apr 2009, 1456 hrs IST
New Delhi: International Management Institute (IMI), Delhi, and National Entrepreneurship
Network (NEN) foundation last week completed an intensive joint 5-day program delivering
the essentials in concepts, teaching methods, and tools for teaching entrepreneurship on
campus at IMI, Delhi. The course was designed for participants to run a wide range of exciting
and engaging programs at their campuses immediately after finishing the workshop.

The NEN Foundation Course is specifically designed for faculty with limited experience in
teaching high-growth entrepreneurship. Over 24 faculty from NEN member institutes in
Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Jaipur, Bhopal and Indore participated in this intensive 5-day course
which was the 4th in the national series by NEN.

Developed by leading entrepreneurship faculty members from around India and the world,
including London Business School, Stanford University, IIM Bangalore and IIM Ahmedabad,
the course was taught by some of the leading entrepreneurship faculty in India, with
successful track records in building comprehensive, high-impact programs on their
campuses.

The course was developed to cater to issues which could inspire and excite faculty members
to teach entrepreneurship, introduce the effective entrepreneurship tools and methods and
connect participants to national community of entrepreneurship educators. The course
content included innovative experiential tools for idea generation, opportunity evaluation,
creation of business models and financial projections and raising capital, and was positioned
for NEN members from across the country.

Workshops are taught by leading entrepreneurship faculty from India like IIM, Calcutta, IIT,
Kanpur, SCMHRD, Pune, Great Lakes Institute and Loyola College, Chennai, International
Management Institute, Delhi, S P Jain Institute and K.J. Somaiya Institute, Mumbai and Mount
Carmel College, Bangalore.

Grab any offer coming your way: Pune B-Schools to

students
17 Dec 2008, 1806 hrs IST, Omkar Sapre , ET Bureau
PUNE: MBA graduates in the city’s BSchools are all dressed up but have very few places to
go, with few recruiters having visited their institutes. Faculty at some of these institutes is
now suggesting students accept whatever jobs and salaries that come their way.

Software and finance companies traditionally recruit more than half of the city’s BSchool
graduates by December every year. This year, hardly any company from these sectors has
arrived at the institutes in spite of having confirmed dates for campus interviews.

Insurance, manufacturing, infrastructure, biotech and pharma companies have visited

institutes with salary packages similar to last year’s . This is making placement departments
at the institutes push hard to invite companies from other sectors while simultaneously
working on students, to get them to come to terms with the current situation.

Pune University’s department of management sciences (PUMBA) dean C M Chitale said that
recruitments were slow and he would soon tell his students to accept whatever jobs they get
at whatever salaries.

"They should get work experience which will help them overcome any feeling of frustration
they may be undergoing. Once the current crisis ends, students who have been working
stand a better chance of being picked up than a student with no experience. We have also
suggested they join small and medium enterprises because the experience they will get in
an SME would be much better than that in a multinational," Mr Chitale said.

He added, "We are also advising and assisting them to start their own businesses instead of
burning the midnight oil for someone else’s profit after tax." The highest salary offered this
year to a student from PUMBA was Rs 5 lakh compared to Rs 8 lakh last year.

The city’s prestigious Institute of Management Development and Research (IMDR) has
placed 25% of its students but expects it to be a long, slow haul this year. Director Ajay
Nagre said, "We have advised students to be pragmatic and practical. The salaries that MBA
students managed to get till last year were unrealistic; easy money is not going to come
their way now. Good jobs will still come, but students have to become better and deliver
higher value for the recruiter," said Mr Nagre.

Symbiosis Institute of Business Management (SIBM) has set up an entrepreneurship cell to

assist students in starting their own ventures. SIBM’s faculty of management dean Arun
Mudbidri said, "We are in talks with a venture capital fund (VCF) to fund our students'
ventures and we will provide a year’s assistance to those with a good business plan. If the
business plans do not work within a year, we will help the student get a placement next
year."
The National Institute of Construction Management and Research claims that placements
were on track despite the slowdown. Its Dean, Ajit Patwardhan, said, "Real estate companies
are not recruiting but infrastructure companies are hiring. Placements are marginally slower
but we have placed 40% students in the country and 30% in Gulf countries."

Not just B-schools

Cultivate aptitude for entrepreneurship from

beginning: Kalam
19 Jan 2008, 1621 hrs IST, PTI

BANGALORE: Former President A P J Abdul Kalam on Saturday said that the students should
be encouraged to cultivate an aptitude for entrepreneurship right from the beginning of
schooling and at the University level.

"We must teach our students to take calculated risks for the sake of larger gain, but within
the ethos of good business", Kalam said in his address to the 43rd annual convocation of
Bangalore University.

"They should also cultivate a disposition to do things right. This capacity will enable them to
take up challenging tasks later".

He said a good educational system is the need of the hour to ensure that the students grow
up to contribute towards the economic growth of a nation. Research, technology and
performance in agriculture, manufacture and services sectors lead to economic growth and
prosperity of the nation, he added.

"Can we sow the seeds of capacity building among the students? There will be continuous
innovation during the learning process. To realise this, special capacities are required to be
built in education system for nurturing the students".

The capacities which are required to be built are research and enquiry, creativity and
innovation, use of high technology, entrepreneurial and moral leadership, he said.

According to him, as India had entered a trillion dollar economy and was continuing to be in
the ascending economic trajectory, there were also concerns about rising unemployment
and illiteracy.

"It is not unemployment, a major problem; it is the question of unemployability a bigger

crisis".

Promoting entrepreneurship in India

6 Jan 2009, 0156 hrs IST, Viren Naidu, ET Bureau
It’s a known fact that India, today, is an emerging economy that is destined to achieve
milestones, on various fronts, in the near future. However, for India, to acquire the status of
a “developed” nation, it needs to create 100 million jobs, statistics point out!

Experts confirm, in an endeavour to achieve this mark, tapping the potential of the
unemployed and exploring opportunities in the employment market, so that each and every
person plays a crucial role in contributing towards the growth of the Indian economy is
necessary. However, how can one create 100 million jobs? And the million-dollar question is
which industry will absorb people and bridge the employment gap? While experts are busy
contemplating the possibilities of the army, the railways, the government and the private
sector to recruit, speculations about the difficulty in employing in such huge numbers
continue to persist.

So, is there any solution to this problem? The answer is entrepreneurship! With several
organisations understanding the importance of entrepreneurs and the ways in which they
can create jobs for the unemployed, thus paving the way for an enriching economy, they are
partnering with several expert bodies such as institutes, financial firms, etc. to foster all
kinds of entrepreneurship- rural, ICT, social, etc.

Partners in growth

India has almost 300 million youth, but only 100 million jobs. Therefore, the country faces a
200 million employment gap. And Amy Christen, Vice President, Corporate Affairs & General
Manager, Networking Academy Operations, Cisco Systems, Inc. believes that this gap can be
bridged through self-employment and entrepreneurship-driven employment.

“We strongly believe in the entrepreneurial spirit of India’s youth. In order to support
entrepreneurship, the right framework, funding and mentoring needs to be provided.
Entrepreneurs and small businesses are always most vulnerable in times of crisis when
funding becomes dearer and difficult to come by. While others may put their efforts on hold
during this economic crisis, it should be India Inc’s organisations’ corporate social
responsibility to continue to fulfill their vision and commitment to this effort.

She also adds that the financial crisis has created opportunities for start-ups. “There are
good people available who are more willing to join start-ups; salaries are more reasonable
and therefore within the reach of smaller companies; and young people, having learned that
jobs in large companies are not necessarily “safe”, may be more inclined to start off on their
own,” Christen adds. Hence structuring programmes to maximise the chances of success
among young entrepreneurs and ensuring that entrepreneurs have strong mentoring and
training to succeed in their business ventures, is vital.

Cisco, in a quest to achieve just that has collaborated with Small Industries Development
Bank of India (SIDBI) and Tiruchirappalli Regional Engineering College- Science and
Technology Entrepreneurs Park (TREC-STEP), a science and technology Entrepreneurs Park
to promote information and communications technology (ICT) entrepreneurship and
innovation in the country.

In this endeavour, SIDBI will finance small ICT businesses in India which will be run by
current and/or former Cisco Networking Academy students, Cisco will subsidise the interest
repayment and guarantee fees on the loans and TREC-STEP will provide customised training
and mentoring to participants in the pilot. The new entrepreneurship pilot program will
initially involve ten ICT businesses in Tamil Nadu. “With job opportunities only available to
approximately one-third of India’s youth, entrepreneurship development is a critical part of
the country’s future.
And such partnerships aim to nurture innovative thinking in small enterprises and support
them with the financial resources to transform those ideas. Such programmes aim to foster
an entrepreneurial environment that helps small businesses contribute to India’s overall
economic development,” said Rakesh Rewari, Deputy Managing Director, SIDBI.

Partners in progress

If you look at the last two decades of economic growth, it has been, solely, due to the rise of
various entrepreneurial start-ups in this country, primarily in the IT and ITeS sectors, experts
say. Entrepreneurship, even in the future will drive economic growth, they confirm. “In the
next two decades, I foresee an opportunity in the social entrepreneurship domain that will
positively influence the global economy. With over 70 per cent of the population still working
in the agricultural sector, 90 per cent of the jobs are still driven by this industry. Come to
think of it, the country has been chugging along, only because of the emergence of small
and medium start-ups in this sector,” adds R Sreenivasan, Co-Founder, Career Launcher that
has initiated partnerships with central and state governments to encourage youth to start
their own small entrepreneurial ventures.

They are also involved in revitalising Industrial Training Institutes (ITRs) with various state
governments. They see this initiative, in a couple of years, creating entrepreneurial
enthusiasm among the rural youth.

“We have partnered with states like Rajasthan to create tools to make the youth of the state
employable and make them entrepreneurial. We have been partnering with TiE, The Indus
Entrepreneurs, a global forum, too, to promote entrepreneurship,” adds Sreenivasan.

Several organisations have moved into setting up schools in villages of rural India that not
only empower them but also encourage them to come up with innovative solutions for rural
issues. “Partnering with state and central governments, along with like minded organisations
to foster entrepreneurship, will be the cornerstone to empower rural India, he asserts. With
these initiatives, we not only strengthen the rural landscape but also uplift the quality of
workforce moving into urban India.

The emergence of entrepreneurs and their contribution to the national economy is quite
visible in India. In order to harness their potential and sustain development, it is essential to
devise apposite strategies for supporting and executing their efforts towards the
entrepreneurial cause. And several organisations need be lauded for their contribution in
this direction.