“Building Entreprenurship Ecosytems in Universities and Communities”

(45TH Startup Sathi webinar Organised by i-Hub dated – 16 May, 2020

Speaker:  Mr Rajesh Nair, Professor of Practice, Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Asia School of Business, Kuala Lumpur

Moderator: M.Nagarajan, IAS and Mr. Hiranmay Mahanta (SSIP-Ihub)

About seminar: The webinar provides detailed information about how to Build Entrepreneurship Ecosystems in Universities. As one of the biggest post COVID challenges will be jobs, it is important to carry out entrepreneurship ecosystems at University level.

Topics of discussion: 

-How to create jobs and who can create jobs in the post-COVID world? 1. Corporate: It depends on the market demand and stability of economy. 2. Government: By beginning infrastructure projects to provide low wages job. But both of these cannot provide any steady jobs, whereas 3.Start-ups can help in creating maximum and high value jobs by building companies.

-How can entrepreneurs be made? Maximum entrepreneurs can be made by focusing on large communities, like at schools and universities. University programs and government programmes can help building ecosystems at university level itself and encourage students to become entrepreneurs. Conversion of ordinary students into aspiring entrepreneurs is critical.  

-Critical factors for transformation: Internal (self-efficacy), external (supportive ecosystem), and early intervention and mentorship. 

- A 48 hour maker fest- Zero to Maker was designed into which very young students across the world build small products. This helped to create confidence in them at a very early stage. The building of entrepreneurs is done in following steps in Zero to Maker programme: Zero-Maker-Innovator-Entrepreneur. For scale ups 3 tier labs are created- Zero lab, Maker lab and Mini Lab.

-How to scale up to ecosystems? An experiment was done in 2014 in a college in Trivandrum where a 5 week boot camp was done after college hours. The result of this experiment after 4 years showed that 1 in 3 students turned out becoming entrepreneurs. 

-Why should universities build ecosystems? It can help building job creators (start-ups) instead of job seekers (placements).

-The challenge of changing the mind-set of the community in becoming entrepreneurs from ordinary students can be overcome by building confidence in the families and show them that they are capable of doing it. 

-Teachers are catalysts in this process. Earlier teachers were the information and knowledge keepers. But nowadays as a lot of resources are available to access the information the role of a teacher can be helpful to create questions in the minds of students.

- Our goal of is to make 100,000 entrepreneurs in next 10 years.