‘The times they are a changin’, crooned singer Bob Dylan years ago. That line fits right into today’s classroom dynamics. With entrepreneurship steadily becoming cooler than salary packages on campuses, and more and more students daring to take the entrepreneurship path right in the middle of their academic lives, the relationship between students and faculty is seeing a marked and interesting change.
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| Ganga S, NEN-trained faculty leader |
The blackboard seems to be heading to the boardroom, with faculty-student relationship being transformed to that of a mentor-mentee. Several of the 1100-plus NEN-trained faculty leaders across
512 NEN member institutes are steadily stepping up their commitment - from previously helping students to set up and run entrepreneurship clubs to now taking on the role of early-stage mentors, hand-holding students as they launch their own ventures, and helping them cope with the struggles of starting up.
Consider TIMSR graduate Sweta Tiwari’s example. Sweta’s entrepreneurial journey was the most unexpected; she would have laughed at the suggestion two years ago. Sweta’s father had taken a loan to finance her MBA studies, and Sweta planned to take up a job to repay the debt. However, a B-Plan competition held by her institute’s NEN E-cell changed her life. At that competition, she met Ganga S, a NEN-trained faculty leader who had attended NEN’s faculty development programs and Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Program on “Tools to Grow Your Business,” (organized in association with the National Entrepreneurship Network), which trains faculty members to mentor women entrepreneurs.
Ganga inspired and supported Sweta to pursue the business idea she presented at the contest – of manufacturing chocolates. Ganga became her mentor, hand-holding her through all the bumps and turns that came her way while starting her venture. From assisting her in developing her model, to strategizing over pricing and packaging, and helping her deal with peer pressure of taking up a job – Ganga helped Sweta develop as an entrepreneur all the way.
Today, Sweta’s business is steadily growing – she gets an average of 20 orders that brings her over Rs 30,000 in profits a month. She skipped her institute’s placement day. Instead, she has hired five people to run operations and is now raising funds for a manufacturing unit that will produce chocolates on a large scale. In October, during the festive season, Sweta bagged her largest order yet: 175 kg amounting to Rs 1,00,000.
Similarly, Rajashree Jain, professor at SICSR, helped Rachit convert his passion for the outdoors into an adventure tourism start-up called Adventure Pulse. “I am an extremely passionate trekker, always ready to escape to mountaineering camps. But then people would always tell me – you can’t be looking at this as a career, can you?” Rachit recalls. Rachit joined SICSR “to do what most street-smart kids do these days – opt for undergraduate studies that will help you get through MBA someday.” Surprisingly, it was at SICSR that he attended an entrepreneurship program, run by Rajashree, which got him thinking about following his heart and launching an enterprise. Rajashree became a mentor for him - answering his questions, sharing contacts, and helping him build his business model. “I helped him refine his initial thinking by helping him with figuring out the opportunity and answering other critical questions,” says Rajashree.
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| Rajashree Jain, Professor at SICSR |
Early-stage mentors like Ganga and Rajashree act as a sounding board for student entrepreneurs, helping to clarify their thinking through discussion and questioning. They help frame the business model, diagnose what other help and input the entrepreneur needs, and then reach into their network, or into the NEN resources, to tap the right people at the right time. Resources could include other entrepreneurs, industry or technical experts, financial or legal professionals, and investors.
“Overall, I think we stop new entrepreneurs from burning their fingers,” feels Haseena Sayed, NEN faculty leader at Mumbai’s Jai Hind College, who is mentoring two student start-ups in the education and entertainment space, respectively.
According to Sunita Singh, cofounder and senior director, NEN, faculty members with the right training and motivation are uniquely positioned to become highly effective first-level mentors for entrepreneurs because: faculty members are accessible to their student, alumni, and community entrepreneurs; these young student entrepreneurs tend to trust that faculty members will not steal their ideas and feel more comfortable opening up to them; and the faculty selected identify working with entrepreneurs as a professional goal, with the approval of their institute management, and therefore can devote consistent time to the endeavor.
However, a limitation with engaging faculty as mentors is that many faculty members have little entrepreneurial and industry experience. This limits their helpfulness to entrepreneurs if they were to rely solely on their expertise. Perhaps, this is the reason why NEN faculty leaders like Indraneel Mukhopadhyay of Institute of Engineering and Management, Kolkata, call themselves a “facilitator.” Indraneel, who is working with student entrepreneur Sudipto on his web company, facilitates Sudipto’s connection with industry experts and encourages him to participate in skill-building workshops.
In addition, NEN has launched a plethora of faculty development programs (FDP) that help to develop the most mature and experienced of its faculty as mentors and facilitators, focusing on subjects like business plans and business models, IP strategies for building competitive advantage, commercializing prototypes, and fundraising for entrepreneurial ventures. Additionally, selected faculty go through advanced internship with investors and seasoned mentors to hone their skills. NEN has partnered with Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, and Goldman Sachs for some of its programs.
“Today, thanks to the courses and my exposure to entrepreneurial thinking, I understand entrepreneurship much better. I look at solving a problem in multiple ways. Irrespective of what start-up ideas my students are working on, I try to bring a similar thinking into it. This approach has helped me become an effective first-level mentor,” ends Haseena.
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More articles on www.nenonline.org. Content provided by NEN
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written by nds lite games, March 18, 2011
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