Catalyzing entrepreneurship from the ground up : an experiment in small-town India

Abstract

Entrepreneurs are essential for creating companies, jobs and growing wealth in communities. Currently, existing entrepreneurial programs start with self-identified entrepreneurs and provide facilities for their growth. However, these programs fail to tap into a whole community of latent youth entrepreneurs. Can more of such youth, with no prior exposure to entrepreneurship, be catalyzed into starting new ventures? If so, how? These questions are addressed in this study with a particular focus on engineering student communities in small town India. By conducting experiments we test the hypothesis that the entrepreneurial attitude of students can be changed through a specially designed learning workshop on innovation, fabrication and entrepreneurship. The subject of this research is the design of the curriculum for this workshop, and the analysis of the effects of the workshop on two experimental student communities. The students were selected without any requirements on academic performance or entrepreneurial experience and aptitude. The results of the experiments show, overwhelmingly, that a significant change in entrepreneurial thinking can be achieved and indicate clearly that innovators and entrepreneurs can be created from ordinary student populations with the right kind of teaching. This can have huge implications for building entrepreneurship ecosystems in different parts of the world, giving average individuals the opportunity to be entrepreneurs.