Entrepreneurship education is a contradictory phrase. Business models and founder journeys can be explained, but entrepreneurship cannot be taught through case studies. An institution can create conditions for experiential learning, the first steppingstone in a longer journey. India’s system often mistakes this starting point for the road. Students leave with presentations and venture capital vocabulary, but without persuading a customer to pay, building under constraints or confronting the consequences of a difficult decision.Traditional MBA programmes are backward-looking by design. They study successful companies after choices have been validated by the market. This produces managers, but does little to cultivate a founder’s ownership mindset. Programmes optimise for people who can analyse someone else’s business instead of creating one. The test is not its place in the syllabus, but whether students build something with real consequences.
The mathematical expected value of choosing entrepreneurship over a regular job is poor. Failure is likely, income is uncertain and the cost can be substantial. Yet building develops muscles that conventional education rarely exercises. A person who finds customers, manages cash, hires people and recovers from mistakes learns to act without perfect information and own the outcome. Even if they return to a salaried career, they often become outliers who understand the difference between being busy and moving the needle.
The weakest link in India’s entrepreneurship education is its faculty because the best curriculum becomes an academic exercise when delivered by people with little exposure to building businesses or taking risks. India has campuses, incubation centres and laboratories, but physical infrastructure cannot compensate for weak human infrastructure. A faculty member disconnected from industry, carrying a salaried mindset and unfamiliar with the uncertainty of building is unlikely to ignite young minds. Scalable ventures take years, so an institution’s role is not to manufacture unicorns in classrooms, but to create the spark.
The entrepreneurial journey has three phases. The first is minus one to zero, when a young person explores an idea without worrying about scale or funding. The second is zero to one, when a business model emerges and customers begin paying. The third is one to ten, when the venture seeks mass adoption and institutional capital. Institutions should play their most meaningful role in the first phase, yet many chase the optics of the third through pitch competitions and demo days held before students develop the curiosity, conviction or stamina to begin.
Too few successful founders and investors return to campuses during this ignition phase, while institutions do a poor job of engaging with the ecosystem or their alumni. This remains true even at IITs and IIMs, leaving campus entrepreneurship to become theatre with banners, competitions and photographs, but little seriousness from students or involvement from faculty.
The problem is not that incubators lack money or infrastructure, but that few are accountable for creating viable ventures. Many are evaluated by grants disbursed, applications processed and events conducted, although their managers may have never built a company or deployed capital. At an institute of national importance I visited, three incubators operated in silos and disbursed about Rs100 crore. Asked about successes from the previous five years, they named alumni companies rather than ventures incubated there. The system confuses activity with outcomes and often serves outside founders seeking grants and facilities better than its own students. Incubators should be led by experienced founders, investors and operators, work through a common institutional platform and be assessed on student participation, customer validation, revenue, follow-on funding and venture survival rather than money distributed.
Short programmes at legacy institutions may begin with the right intent, but cash flows encourage dependence on traditional faculty and neat teaching modules. New-age schools entered with a focus on venture building, then expanded across disciplines and began resembling the institutions they meant to disrupt. Certificate courses compress entrepreneurship into eight or twelve weeks of online, one-way gyaan. When AI can explain concepts instantly, information delivery is no longer education.
The opportunity is significant. Being a founder carries greater social capital, students are questioning the return on money and time from traditional degrees, and many are choosing technology, machine learning and experiential programmes over the conventional MBA route. Academia remains indispensable to research, but commercialisation demands imagination, risk appetite and iteration. Business leaders say even graduates from top institutions require one or two years of training. The answer is not to turn every student into a founder, but to ignite their minds before they leave campus. Slides can describe the journey, but only execution can prepare someone to undertake it.
(The article is authored by Kulmani Rana, founder of VenturEdu and Fibonacci X. The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author. ETEntrepreneur does not endorse or take responsibility for the content.)