The ongoing coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns have widened the demand and supply gap in the world. And, the gap can be filled only with technical expertise and soft skills. This demand has been making engineering institutions a hotbed for developing and nurturing entrepreneurship among their students, who want to build a self-dependent sustainable lifestyle for the ‘new normal’ world. Though entrepreneurship and startups started as a major lifestyle choice in these colleges, with the unprecedented times it has now become a need to have quality which allows students to test themselves before going in the real world outside these colleges.
ROLE OF INCUBATION MODEL
Incubators play a key role in managing and providing a safe space for students to test their ideas and fail safely to try again. The iteration rate may be around 60-70% as of now, where these many students are not pursuing the startups post graduation. However, this exposes them to the possibilities and also gives them the taste of amount of possibility they can have, if this is done right. However, there are still 30% students, who stick to entrepreneurship and 1% of them lead a successful startup in coming times.
Engineering institutions provide various resources through incubators to their students to build a success startups which are not limited to access to labs, research set-ups, servers for IT-based solutions, also a huge audience as students and staff to test and pilot any product or service you build. These institutions provide highly educated and trained faculty as mentors to these startups, working space, and sometime incalculable resources to them to build what may change their lives. Due to the supply gap in job opportunities, entrepreneurship has now become need of hour. The knowledge of entrepreneurship has opened many new avenues for the graduate students, who probably have spent their family’s fortune in earning this degree.
ENGINEERING INSTITUTES HELP
Engineering institutions are changing their rules to assist students in this effort. Colleges provide attendance relaxation if registered with incubator, deferred placement opportunity if you fail in startup in 1-2 year after graduation, access to resources at free of cost which will cost huge outside institution. These resources are like mentors, labs, workspace and much more. A startup in operation has to invest at least 30,000-40,000 per month in various costs, which as part of institutional incubator is taken care of. This revenue saving also motivates students to try their hands on entrepreneurship as early as possible.
Many successful startups from engineering institution also become a long-term recruiter for the institutions if they extend the best support and keep founder motivated and engaged from the institution’s side.
This serves the institution many benefits, by not just providing a new recruiter for years to come but also other benefits like IP benefits, royalty through incubator, benefit in institution ranking, attraction for new admission, but also more funds from government bodies for promoting entrepreneurship.
Engineering institutions across the country don’t have a choice any more but it is the necessity to promote entrepreneurship and startups to give students choice to decide what kind of life they want to lead. More successful startup from colleges will also mean students becoming employment generator at a very young age, which is a benefit for economy of our country.
WAY FORWARD
Currently, we measure success of a startup based on the amount of investment they raise which is not the case in all the startups. Many startups don’t raise huge amounts but can create huge impact in small time. These startups are majorly in the areas which are a challenge for larger population such as water, energy, access to education. As a next step many engineering institutions have to look beyond apps and tech-based startups to invest more in real issues of society to create more impact than just looking for more investment.
The writer is Chief Executive Officer at AIC-JK Lakshmipat University.