How College Incubators Are Creating Growth Opportunities For Startups

India has one of the largest educational infrastructures in the world with over 1.5 Mn schools. In fact, the country has more than doubled the number of schools it had in the last four decades, with an uptick in the number of universities and engineering colleges during this period. 

From the purely theoretical education delivery, the learning approach has slowly pivoted towards experiential. In recent years, collaborative learning and education enabled by technology have entered the ecosystem. 

The biggest thrust to higher education has come in the engineering arena, and over 1.5 Mn Indian students graduate from 6,200 plus colleges all over the country every year. However, less than 20% of engineering graduates actually get jobs which implies that over a million of them are left to find alternative employment opportunities each year. 

The low employment is a clear indicator that there is not only a severe lack of jobs for young engineers but there might also be some fundamental shortcomings in the way employability and entrepreneurship are integrated into education delivery. 

Why Indian Engineering Colleges Are Not Creating Successful Startups

The focus in most engineering colleges continues to be on imparting knowledge and helping students get job opportunities through campus placement drives. Despite having over 300 startup incubators in the country, we hardly ever hear of any successful startup having its roots in a student incubator of any tech college or university. 

It is not the lack of quality of education or skillsets that have pegged Indian student incubators back, but the lack of a cohesive and networked approach as well as the barriers to entrepreneurial mindset especially in Tier II and Tier III cities. 

Education is costly in India, and despite being ranked third in the world in terms of the number of startups, entrepreneurship is not favoured by most parents and students alike. The convention is to follow the safer line of scoring high marks, getting through campus placements, and securing a well-paying job. 

The 300 startup incubators we have in the country have not been able to make the desired impact due to the fact that they continue to operate within their silos. This limits access to resources, knowledge pool, funding as well as real-world market exposure. 

Moreover, the student incubators run by colleges are usually led by academicians who might not be able to build the right entrepreneurial mindset among students. An average student incubator in the country has about 25K engineering students attached to it, which in itself severely limits the extent of resources or guidance that an aspiring entrepreneur is likely to get. 

Roadmap To Building Startup Ecosystem In Colleges

The need of the hour is not just to build incubators that encourage students to create innovative solutions but also to adopt a collaborative ecosystem approach towards entrepreneurship. 

When we look at similar college-based incubators in countries like Singapore and the US, they all leverage the ecosystem approach wherein the colleges are connected with each other, corporates, governmental authorities, and more. This enables the incubators to have access to all necessary resources including technology, finance and industry guidance. 

In engineering colleges, every student is equipped with the right skills to develop smart applications and tools. With the understanding that modern tech is capable of solving various problems faced by people at scale, young students are now coming up with ideas and concepts. 

The need of the hour is an environment within the campuses where innovative thought and problem-solving skills are further cultivated. While the Government of India and various state governments, financial institutions and private VCs are increasingly focusing on providing funding options to early-stage startups, the students need a diversity of inputs and mentoring apart from funds.

Almost all the students have ideas on how they can solve a problem, but what is needed is the mentoring support and tools that help them experiment and hone these. When a student actually manages to create a breakthrough, the university incubators can help them patent the same and take some stake in the eventual IP or startup to benefit when they achieve commercial success. 

Startup founders and business leaders who have scaled their enterprises must be roped in to familiarize the students with real-world business challenges, and ways to overcome those obstacles. Such integrations would be the ideal base for entrepreneurial training in colleges across the country.

Conclusion

India is rapidly ascending as an economic power, and the business sector is steadily evolving. A harsh reality of the changing times is that the government, irrespective of efforts or intention, will not be able to create adequate jobs to absorb the entire talent base present in the country. There are thousands of engineering colleges alone in the country, and the numbers keep growing. 

By establishing a network of campus incubators, we can create local employment and a better quality of life for the communities around the campuses. For instance, if we look at a smaller town like Hubbali, an incubator there can help local entrepreneurship evolve and address the challenges of the community. 

Cumulatively, such incubators will be able to transform the entire nation and create a greater distribution of social and economic development in the non-metro parts of India.

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