The need to teach entrepreneurship

WHAT THEY DONT TEACH YOU AT B-SCHOOL

Hari Padmanabhan

B-schools need to start a specialised stream to take students through the process of building an organisation

Graduating from an Indian Institute of Technology in 1975 was akin to stepping out of an ivory tower. You had two simple options while considering a Masters programme: Masters in technology, if you were in love with your engineering, or an MBA, if you thought of yourself as a people-person.

I chose the latter. The decision was based on what I had heard about those who went to management schools and whose careers took off.

However, my expectations were hazy at the time of my entry to B-school. The B-school helped me learn the softer aspects of managing a business and get a basic understanding of the various functions that came together to create an organisation.

In the corporate world, as I later found out, each organisation has its bias, its favourite function, towards which it is tilted or inclined. For instance, in my first job in an IT company, the entire ethos was sales-driven.

The sales people were heroes. It's perfectly fine to have a blue-eyed function but you can't underrate other functions. So, when I set up my own company, although it was strongly sales-driven "" which was good "" I did not focus too much on financial planning, which was potentially disastrous.

Your learning at a management institution not only gives you a perspective about business but it also paints a picture, which may not necessarily hold true in the corporate world.

For one, the big gap between B-school education and the real world is when it comes to entrepreneurship and running your own business. When I went to B-school 27 years ago, the idea of entrepreneurship was not "cool" for professionals.

Today the concept has earned respect and acknowledgment from B-schools. Some schools have structured courses that teach the entrepreneurship process of starting with an idea and converting it into a business. But back then, management education didn't include entrepreneurship.

I felt the lack of this aspect of business education, when I set up my own IT firm "" Insyst Technologies "" after working with IDM for 4 years and the Hewlett-Packard distributor in the UAE for three years.

So when we started, we had no evolved plan or process in place to set up a venture. Unfortunately, when you're a one-man show, there are no guidelines that a B-school can provide.

With the surge in entrepreneurial activity among professionals, given the boom in IT and some other areas, B-schools surely need to start a specialised stream to teach entrepreneurship as well as take students through the process of building an organisation.

To enhance the value that students get out of such a stream, experienced alumni could share their experiences and present case studies of professional entrepreneurship.

Apart from this, I also believe that most formal education, including that of the B-school, inculcates a structured thought process in people, which they tend to work with naturally.

Due to this, they may often miss out on thinking out of the box and new opportunities that may stare them in the face. Or at times, they may not see the value in something new, something untried, because it doesn't fit into their mould.

The initial challenge for B-school alumni is to get down to learning from people who have had the experience but not a formal education. I believe that B-schools should work cohesively (integrate significantly) with industry and business.

There needs to be a constant interchange of faculty "" with the teaching faculty going into the corporate world at least once every three to five years for at least one year each time.

B-schools should have corporate managers and entrepreneurs/ businessmen work continually in formulating the course content, creating case studies and delivering workshops. Guest lectures alone are insufficient.

This interaction should be formalised by creating an apex body that brings together corporates and entrepreneurs and headed by a Dean who oversees the curriculum development.

The body should also be entrusted with the responsibility of ensuring a strong two-way flow of learning between the institution and the corporate world.

(Hari Padmanabhan is executive director, ICICI Infotech Ltd. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, in 1977)