Academics to entrepreneurship
IIT Kharagpur has scored unexpected endeavours by setting up Technology Business incubator (TBI) for promotion of entrepreneurship and innovation and also kept its commitment by initiating the first school of engineering entrepreneurship (Rajendra Mishra School of Engineering Entrepreneurship (RMSOEE).
RMSoEE founded at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur in the year 2010 aims to encourage entrepreneurial minds of the engineering students. It is a first school of its kind in India. The School imparts strong entrepreneurial culture and ecosystem for venture creation and early start-ups. The school offers 5-year integrated dual degree program with M. Tech in Engineering Entrepreneurship and B. Tech in an Engineering discipline. The B. Tech or Dual Degree M. Tech students of engineering departments opt for this program from their second year of study. They continue their B. Tech in their parent department while taking courses in entrepreneurship. Finally they earn their entrepreneurship specialization in their fifth year. RMSoEE was created to establish a model dual degree M. Tech in engineering entrepreneurship programme. Hence the faculty have diverse background and experiences as appropriate for this unique school. The courses are designed with a blend of both technology and management aspects. Here, the faculty and students are nurtured with a culture of innovation, inquiry, problem-solving, entrepreneurship, and research, to assure that the students stay current with the latest developments in their respective fields, and they are encouraged to explore various interdisciplinary areas.
Infrastructure
Innovation Lab: I-lab is where innovations born. Innovation Lab at RMSoEE, aims to produce entrepreneurially oriented competent individuals. Each student of RMSoEE is attached with innovation laboratory from 2nd year onwards of their IIT learning journey. The lab provides a viable ecosystem for research on various aspects of innovation and entrepreneurship which includes Business Intelligence, Business Architecture, and Technology Interventions for venture creation, Product Development Strategies and Quality of Services. Through innovation based practices, the lab acts as a platform for knowledge creation, maintenance and dissemination to stakeholders.
Business Analytics Lab: The analytics lab at RMSoEE is envisioned to provide hands-on training to the students and innovators on application of various analytical tools and techniques for business intelligence and business decision making. The lab would house necessary hardware platform and software tools for supporting research and training needs in the following areas: Statistical analysis, Forecasting and predictive analytics, Market analytics, Financial analytics, Operational analytics, Data mining and visualization, Big data analytics.
Techno-Entrepreneurial Leadership Lab: MSME sector contributes towards a major part of the country’s economy but its development lags behind due to lack of techno entrepreneurial behavior of these industry leaders to accommodate the uncertainty in market completion, fund availability, capacity utilization, becoming the product champions and negotiating with internal and external environment. This lab tends to develop the different measures of techno-entrepreneurial leadership quality through uncertainty management, guiding radical innovations, integrating value network, managing innovation life cycle, etc. and also provide some of the other computational facilities for carrying out quantitative and qualitative research on the same.
Healthcare Analytics Lab: Big Data has tremendous potential for transforming the healthcare industry. The healthcare analytics lab at RMSoEE would attempt to identify managerial issues in healthcare service delivery. The lab would also develop innovative analytical models and evaluate their effectiveness in Indian scenario. Some of the activities being planned under this lab are: Analytics for Medical Diagnosis –e.g. detection of cancerous cells etc., healthcare knowledge management, Personalized Medicine, Decision making in emergency care, Predictive Analytics and Preventive Measures, Patient classification, Patient Monitoring, Patient Privacy Preserving techniques.
Modeling Lab: The modern business environment is affected by a number of factors making business models highly complex and dynamic. The analysis of business models requires a huge number of scenarios to be generated and iterative performance evaluation. The complexity is further aggravated with the volume, velocity, and the variety of data generated in the business process. Big data analytics becomes indispensable for effective business decisions in this complex and dynamic business environment. We need to simulate and analyze the dynamics of network among various agents, business environments, and evaluation of business models. The modeling lab would facilitate evaluation of innovative and entrepreneurial ideas. The lab would be equipped with tools for Statistical modeling, Game theoretic modeling, System dynamics, Network modeling and analysis, and Business model analysis etc. (See Figure 3).
Figure 3. Start-ups supported by STEP/TBI IIT Kharagpur |
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The typical case as described above, at IIT Kharagpur STEP/TBI center incubated more than 85 companies of different domain, a list of which is attached in Annexure I. The distribution of initiative shows only 12% is created by the faculties, 19% is promoted by the students, and rest are the outside entrepreneurs. The other observation from the list we observed that, 27% within the lot of outside entrepreneurs are alumni of the institute, and this may the silver lining. This may indicate that the students, who went outside with jobs and interacted with the industry, got more idea about the entrepreneurial opportunity. The distribution surely puts a question mark on the academic entrepreneurship success in a premier technology school in India. The outside entrepreneur companies do get technology and management support in terms of mentoring from the institute. The institute has created a new Entrepreneurship School (Rajendra Mishra School of Engineering Entrepreneurship) to facilitate the center and make academic contribution through training and research in the domain.
Challenges
1. Lack of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Orientation: There is a lack of orientation provided to students during education at schools and college .This hinders the growth of an innovative and entrepreneurship mindset during the childhood phase making them unprepared to take up future challenges and risks to start up or initiate creativity.
2. Lack of Proper Handholding for Entrepreneurs: There is a lack of proper handholding for prospective innovators and entrepreneurs who wish to venture into creative knowledge production. There is a lack of innovation and entrepreneurship support mechanisms across all prominent higher education institutions.
3. Lack of Support Program for Commercialization of Products: The innovativeness is hindered due to lack of proper commercialization support mechanism, and patent support mechanism. In the absence of proper financial support incentive to promote innovation, several ideas do not get the opportunity to be commercially available in the market and die during conceptualization, or initial product prototype development phase.
4. Lack of Industry Linkages: The absence of proper innovation support provided to employees in private sector and industrial houses to pursue individual project is seldom available. On the other hand individual employees are restricted to pursue their own innovation as the industries fear that they might compromise on the Intellectual property of the organization. Lack of industry support available for innovators and students involved in innovations to carry out innovation at industries is another major reason for lack of innovative and entrepreneurship practices.
5. Lack of Government University Interaction: Lack of government to academic institution communication leading to failure of support programs run at HEI based cluster parks. This has been a major problem in incubation support systems and programs running on government support. Lack of communication is hampering the proper functioning of the innovation system at HEI run cluster parks.
6. Lack of Definition of Success: It is very difficult to define just what “success” represents relative to business incubators represents. There are a number of reasons for this. The first is that business incubators are started for many different reasons; some, to increase the economy, others to increase the job market, while others are simply the extension centers in a University setup. Some business incubators are not started with a clear mission in mind. Because of different starting points, or no starting point at all, different affiliation, it is difficult to view how well a business incubator is doing (See Figure 4).
Figure 4. Host institutions for incubation centers in India |
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ACADEMIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP: A WAY FORWARD IN EMERGING COUNTRY
The present growth of innovation in India is in its infancy compared to its foreign compatriots, but with tremendous growth prospects owing to its geopolitical clout and demographic positioning. India with a 1.3 billion population and a 500 million middle class base requires a flourishing manufacturing base, service sector, agricultural self-sufficiency, defense indignation and sufficiency as well as a globally competing knowledge base comprising of primary, secondary and higher education (See Figure 5).
Figure 5. Patent details |
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The HEIs and academic entrepreneurship drive function as catalysts in facilitating multiplier effect on self-employment opportunities and inculcating ‘entrepreneurship spirit’ among the young generation. The other objectives are promotion of micro enterprises at rural level by providing vital information and support in organizing research and documentation activities, creation and advancement of new knowledge and insights in entrepreneurship theory building and practice research, developing corporate excellence, sentising and improving the support system for facilitating management of existing enterprises by accelerating the process of entrepreneurship development and spread its impact across all strata of the society. HEIs also provide incubation facilities in the form of physical space, funding support, legal and financial mentorship.
HEIs and stand-alone incubation bodies support start-up entrepreneurs with incubation, training, and mentoring facilities. The limitations of these HEIs or stand-alone bodies are that they do not follow any particular and separate mandate. This leads to some sort of overlapping facilities or functions for the start-ups with overlapping activities. So, there is a requirement for specific and separate mandates for both HEIs and stand-alone incubation institutions. For example, selection of appropriate technology is one of the major tools to drive the success of entrepreneurial activities. The selected technology for incubation support must be able to serve directly to public need. Technology institutions within HEIs can provide, accelerate and promote technological aspects of a start-up whereas a society under stand-alone organization may provide social angle to it. This would provide a better, rich and long term support for the start-ups.
Distinct and specific mandates for the entrepreneurship supporting systems as discussed above would better facilitate a networking system for nurturing entrepreneurial activities and their development. This can be further developed into a network of community development organizations across the country. These organization networking can engage in several kinds of community development, from revitalizing entrepreneurs, to providing incubation, to sustaining and creating vibrant entrepreneurial societies, and ensuring opportunities for all entrepreneurs in the state and country, facilitating corporate entrepreneurship. As a network, these organizations may join together to strengthen the countries entrepreneurial approach through development of industries making it more strong and dynamic, through resource sharing efficiently, and advocating for sound programs and policies. These communities developed through networking would facilitate the entrepreneurs possess a vibrant force, and can adapt to the rapid changes of the society and also build on the knowledge they accumulate.
Through networking among the different organizations, academic entrepreneurship can facilitate a better entrepreneurial activity, but a complete system with different initiatives and policies would provide an improved internal management system for aligning the goal of individual entrepreneur within the academic arena, incubation system, and government incubation objective. The specific research has identified diversified goals within the academic entrepreneurship drive in HEIs. The individual researchers in academic institutions have no or minimum clue about industry requirements, the institutional system does not surely know about the convergent point of economic requirement and institutional goal, the government on the other hand is formulating the policies on macro-economic parameters without having clear idea of scientific resources in hand.
The start-up companies should be mentored by the experts of various incubation centers to differentiate their innovation from the market. The pool of mentors should be from, industry, academia and technology experts. This would help them to differentiate their products from the existing products/technologies available in market. This can only happen with proper databases in hand. This creates a knowledge resource base for the start-ups that helps them to connect and become successful. Universities should try to analyze the data received through their entrepreneurial engagement for developing university policies, strategies and initiatives related to entrepreneurship. Evaluation of entrepreneurship should help the universities in fulfilling these internal needs and provide strategic information for short, medium and long-term planning, target setting, and decision-making for their next step.
Data creates opportunities for entrepreneurs to work more efficiently, effectively and also facilitates their active participation in network creation and development. Accessing data related to the different aspects of their activities becomes difficult for the start-up entrepreneurs. Therefore, creating a database for facilitating different entrepreneurial activities of the start-ups should be one of the major objectives of the incubation centers. The data repository can be treated as “knowledge platform”, facilitating a higher degree of flexibility in the entrepreneurial activity structure enabling alteration and combination of views to provide a dynamic and interactive platform for different context setup.
Finally, the academic entrepreneurship should recognize ‘failure’ in business as learning option. The incubation centers within academic arena should invest on “entrepreneur’’ and not evaluate the projects in isolation. The resource building through actual businesses and less on business plans would create an environment of positive vive towards entrepreneurship in emerging country like India.