Abstract
How did Entrepreneurship Evolve as a Field of Study?
The concept of teaching entrepreneurship started in the West in the 1930s as part of a governmental initiative to rebuild their war-torn economies. McClelland’s research publication in the 1960s on motivation theories also shaped the thinking related to entrepreneurship. A trait-based definition of entrepreneurs emerged; that is, these are likely to be a set of people driven by higher achievement orientation, greater risk-taking ability and greater tolerance to ambiguity.
The next significant impetus in entrepreneurial education was triggered by a surge in the technology-led growth that happened in the form of garage start-ups in Silicon Valley. The financial success of these firms attracted a lot of investments in technology-led ventures and lured many people to know and try entrepreneurship. The prolific growth of this ecosystem and its self-actualising act of endowing institutions with funds to invest in teaching entrepreneurship spurred a lot of interest in this field.
In 2000, Shane and Venkataraman published an article on The Promise of Entrepreneurship as a Field of Research. This was a seminal article in defining the field of study—they outlined a framework to identify, evaluate and exploit entrepreneurship. This revived the research in entrepreneurship across all business schools—faculty and doctoral students doing research in entrepreneurship, setting up of entrepreneurship areas with doctoral programmes, etc. Right now, entrepreneurship research is where many strategy and organisational behaviour (OB) scholars have started to show interest.
On the pedagogical front, much of teaching entrepreneurship focused on developing business plans. Courses were offered with the sole objective of writing business plans describing people, milestone plans and finances. However, all the stakeholders realised the limitation of working on a plan when the entrepreneurial journey is mostly under uncertain circumstances while plans are good for a more certain environment. Given the hyper-paced business environment, business plans developed yesterday became invalid today!
The present pedagogy looks at entrepreneurship as a method, akin to the scientific method. It aims to teach students tools and techniques that are needed to explore the uncertainty surrounding the venture idea in a cautious manner. Currently, there are two popular methods that are taught—Effectuation and Lean Start-up methodology.
What has been the Role of NS Raghavan Centre of Entrepreneurship Learning (NSRCEL) in Nurturing Entrepreneurship in India?
NSRCEL is one of the early startup incubation centres in the country that was open to anyone who wants to pursue entrepreneurship, irrespective of whether they are IIMB students or alumni. One of the issues early on was that while entrepreneurship was seen positively as a career option, most did not know what it entailed. We wanted to give opportunities to as many budding entrepreneurs as possible so that the probability of success stories increased. The approach of NSRCEL has been very broad—with no specific leaning on hot topics. Everyone who has an idea and wants to try is welcome here.
Entry into the incubation process was through submitting/pitching business ideas. These screening meetings were held multiple times a year. On average, out of 40–50 who would apply, about five or so would get selected for the incubation. The thesis for selection was to enable entrepreneurship and not be a gatekeeper for the investment companies. Therefore, the philosophy we prescribed to was set up by Prof Kumar, the then Chairperson: ‘When in Doubt, Incubate’. He felt that incubation within an academic set-up provided a safety buffer for entrepreneurs. Since entrepreneurship mainly deals with uncertainty, most first ventures fail. Therefore, academic incubators should enable smart failing to keep the cost of failing—both financial and reputational—low. In the years that followed, we did see that many instances wherein the first incubation within NSRCEL has been a failure or moderate success, but the entrepreneurs have learnt under the mentorship provided by the institute and then been successful in subsequent ventures.
In fact, to popularise entrepreneurship, Prof Sabari, who followed Prof Kumar as the Chairperson, created a programme called the Launchpad. Here, anyone can invest 3 months of their time to safely experience and experiment with entrepreneurship. Thereafter, it is entirely their own decision to continue. Thus, NSRCEL initiated this now-popular Launchpad or preincubation entrepreneurial-acclimatisation opportunity.
The main contribution of NSRCEL is mentoring entrepreneurs with tools to understand the future, acknowledge failure as an integral part of the entrepreneurship journey, develop a resilient mindset that helps them learn from failures and be empowered with a toolkit to draw up actions to mitigate failures.
IIMB and NSRCEL have recognised the need to popularise entrepreneurship among women. The first programme, called Management Programme for Women Entrepreneurs (MPWE), was started in the early 2000s. Over 800 women benefitted from this 4-week residential summer programme. Subsequently, with support from entities like Goldman Sachs and the Department of Science and Technology, this programme evolved into two separate programmes—the Women Startup Programme (WSP) and the 10,000 Women Programme.
WSP: Starts with an online 6-week MOOC called Do Your Venture programme. At the end of the course, need to submit a 2-minute pitch and, if found interesting, about 300 women get to a pre-incubation programme which ends with a pitch for incubation. A 6-month incubation helps the entrepreneurs to get to a sustainable venture at the end. 10,000 Women programme, sponsored by Goldman Sachs, focuses on 3 weeks of management education, helping women build confidence, capabilities and a network.
What are your Thoughts about the Future of Entrepreneurship as a Field of Study?
From the perspective of teaching entrepreneurship, we want to expand our scope of influence. Our aim is to reduce the high selectivity and differencing gates used in typical classroom-based education. Therefore, our focus is to get a larger number of people to understand entrepreneurship, better leveraging online means of education and creating a high-impact scalable education combining onscreen and offscreen.
The idea of training in entrepreneurship is not always to start a business. In fact, it is extremely important even in the context of large organisations. We need ‘entrepreneurial’ leaders rather than managers. This set of entrepreneurs should be trained to cope with uncertainties and ambiguities and use their decision-making skills to not only to help themselves but also others. They should drive change leadership in their workplace. Thus, they would be empowered to develop clarity in understanding their core competencies, plan to create new core competencies, think through whether the existing organisation structure will be able to support the new team, and, if not, incubate it as a new entity. A lot of exploratory work can be pursued in the lean startup mode, which a well-established organisation structure might not be able to handle.
Also, our entrepreneurial ecosystem needs more conversation pods—socialisation events like book clubs and off-work gatherings, where people would interact with each other and discover opportunities through happenstances. Here, innovations do not happen by design. These pods allow an open and free space to talk and exchange thoughts without fear of being judged or pressured to yield. Eventually, these networks will lead to more entrepreneurial opportunities.
How should Large Companies bring in this Spirit of Entrepreneurship?
As I already said, large companies need entrepreneurial managers to thrive in this increasingly uncertain world. Also, the big companies need to have more conversation spaces where employees start socialising beyond work-related topics. These enable ‘water cooler conversations’ in which employees can exchange problems and solutions more freely without the fear of being judged. It is in these conversations that they will be able to get innovative ideas and resources to pursue them. Another aspect that companies need to focus on is to enable and celebrate failures—not penalise failures. Failures are stepping stones to success. However, the learning from failures needs to percolate across layers. People need to accept failure as part of the desire to grow.
What are the Issues in Entrepreneurship in India that need Attention?
Existing policies supporting entrepreneurship are very good. The growing number of incubators, amount of grant money available, supporting people from diverse backgrounds—all of these are going well.
However, there are two things that need to be addressed:
Gender issues in entrepreneurship
Typically, women-led startups get only 2–3 per cent of the VC money. This needs to change. Given our societal norms, women are the primary caregivers to young children and senior citizens. Thus, they have an accurate understanding of many of those challenges, which many others in society are not privy to. We must understand that the essence of entrepreneurship is about solving problems. Therefore, we need to create an ecosystem that enables more funding to women so that they can experiment and come up with solutions to solve these problems.
Over-emphasis on unicorns
The other discomforting piece is the overemphasis on the metric of creating unicorns. Expecting all ventures to become unicorns could be dangerous. It puts a lot of undue performance pressure on the founders, typically youngsters, who might not get it right at the first shot. The ecosystem should enable entrepreneurs to create temporary organisations to experiment, survive, grow and become profitable. However, imposing the condition to become a unicorn is unfair. Instead, our ecosystem should encourage a community of ventures of all sizes. Thus, the metrics of success of entrepreneurship should be the network effects created, communities invested in solving problems and their symbiotic relations.
Is it possible for you to learn to cycle without falling? You might fall a lesser number of times or more. But once you learn, you will not even remember the falls! Similarly, failure is an inherent part of entrepreneurship. These mistakes made would help you manoeuvre into parts that are more lucrative. Also, do not try to do things alone. Extensively leverage mentors and incubators and actively participate in networks that will help you get inputs and clarity on your plan forward.