Why do we have so many Indian successful startups blooming out of classrooms? At IIT dorms or in local colleges, education is turning out to be a ground where fresh business ideas are being hatched. And such a transformation is not random either as it is driven by the way India is redefining the very learning process.
Using a University as a Launching Site
The best educational centers in India have turned out to be centers of entrepreneurship. Institutions such as IIT Bombay, IIM Ahmedabad and BITS Pilani are no longer synonymous to degrees. They are creating creators, innovators, and programmers. This has been evidenced by the emergence of incubation centres in these campuses. To cite one example, SINE (Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship) at IIT Bombay has assisted start-ups such as IdeaForge which emerged as the market leader in drone technology. Entrepreneurship courses have also been introduced in IIMs which encompass taking the student through the steps of starting a business to when to scale-up the business.
Such institutes offer resources, such as mentorship, seed funding, networking which used to be provided only to the well-connected entrepreneurs. It’s not unlike the ecosystem around tech trends; even searches like parimatch mobile app download show how tech-savvy youth turn to mobile tools quickly. On the same note, these are student entrepreneurs who embrace digital assets early, making them have an upper hand.
Social Concept Shift: Rote to Real Problem Solving
The change does not concern only the introduction of a startup cell into a college building. Lots of schools and colleges are in fact reconsidering their basic curriculums and methodologies. Project based learning, design thinking workshops, and practical problem solving are replacing rote memorization. Colleges such as Ashoka University and IIIT-Hyderabad have launched interdisciplinary courses and students work across disciplines to develop actual solutions to actual users.
In one of my visits in an engineering college in Coimbatore, I interacted with students who designed a water monitoring system that is used by small scale farmers. The initial development of the project was as a class project but later became a funded startup with local implementation. These students did not wait to graduate to learn but they learnt through building, testing, failing and improving, as part of their coursework. This changed form of learning educates the students to be entrepreneurs and not merely employees.
Scaling entrepreneurial thinking with edTech
EdTech companies are making this entrepreneurial spirit go outside of the ivory tower. Students in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities have now access to high-quality material previously only available in the metros using tools such as Unacademy, Udemy and UpGrad. Most of these websites provide start-up specific courses, mentorship and case-studies of Indian start-ups. The example of WhiteHat Jr. can be given- it is a platform that began to teach children (as young as six) to create simple apps by coding. They are exposed to tech thinking at a young age whether they end up being entrepreneurs or not. In the same manner, applications such as Skill-Lync will allow students of engineering to get direct connections to industry quality tools and projects. They are important resources to fill the knowledge gap between what is learned in a textbook and what can be done in real life.
And just as someone downloads the parimatch mobile app download for a smoother, mobile-first experience, today’s students expect their learning to be on-demand, personalized, and application-based. EdTech satisfies that aspiration and develops business thinking at a large scale.
Investment, Coaching, and Governmental Impulse
The government of India has made a great contribution towards the correlation of education and innovation. The idea has been further entrenched into the system through initiatives such as Startup India, Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) and setting up of Atal Tinkering Labs in schools. AIM is the only organisation to have established thousands of labs in India that encourage innovation as early as Class 6 level. In addition to the policy, angel investors and venture capitalists are scouting more early-stage startups out of student communities. Indeed, even at college level a number of competitions now provide actual equity investment rather than a mere prize fund. As an example, the Indian Angel Network has funded a number of startups that started in colleges and later on raised big funding rounds. The availability of this support ecosystem is no longer scarce, but now it is organized and broad.
These networks are characterised by the connection between mentors and students and assisting them beyond the fundamentals. The time it takes a given problem to be solved has shrunk to near zero; be it assistance in fine-tuning a pitch deck or manufacturing issues. This means that after graduation the ideas that students have no longer fade away, they tend to gain more strength.
Conclusion
In India, education is not restricted to degrees and placements anymore. With the help of changes in teaching, friendly institutions, growth of EdTech platforms and policies taking the initiative, it has turned into a fertile place of business innovation. Current students are taught to construct, fail and reconstruct- just like entrepreneurs in real life. It is not only leading to the rising startup culture in India but also changing the face of 21 st century learning. Just like how the parimatch mobile app download offers a new kind of user interaction, this education-business fusion is offering a new kind of career path. It is daring, innovative and is classroom constructed.
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