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Higher education institutes like the Indian Institute of Management (IIMs) should create an ecosystem to develop not just the ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ skills, but also entrepreneurial skills among its students.
According to Jaideep Sarkar, India’s Ambassador to the Kingdom of Bhutan and an IIM-Calcutta alumnus, institutes such as IIMs should nurture and foster risk-taking abilities so as to be able to churn out more entrepreneurs in the country.
‘Educational system’
“Our educational system continues to be dominated by an academic hierarchy where places are fixed depending on how good you are in maths and science. We have created a skewed educational system that over-values quantitative ability,” Sarkar said.
He was delivering his speech at the Freshers’ Welcome Programme for the 55th batch of IIM-C’s two-year flagship PGP course here on Friday. The current batch of PGP (2018-20) has 463 students, out of whom 123 are women.
Emphasising the need to develop entrepreneurship skills among Indian graduates, Sarkar said that higher education institutes should not restrict themselves to meeting the demand of the corporate world.
Rather, they should focus on developing social entrepreneurship and public service entrepreneurship.
Given that the IIMs have the “cream of students”, they should set the pace and create an ecosystem for nurturing talent.
“Our great institutions like the IIMs and the IITs should aspire to be more than elegant salons that bring together hungry job seekers and the employers. The system must allow students to explore….” he said. According to Sarkar, one of the biggest challenges in nurturing entrepreneurship in India is cultural aversion (of people) towards taking risks.
“It is also to do with the stigma of failure. However, when it comes to innovation failure is as important as success, he pointed out.
Advising students not to get “into zones of comfort”, he said, adversity or stressful conditions bring out the most innovative solutions in the mind of an individual.
“It is not right to get into zones of comfort, particularly given the way the global economy is changing. If you want to become a leader or an innovator then you have to think not just out of the box but without the box,” he said.
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