Entrepreneurship in today’s time has gained more importance than ever. Thanks to the ever-evolving internet technologies that have given people know-how about what entrepreneurship means and what is necessary in real-life scenarios. Even so, many people, particularly young students who will be entering the labour force in the near future, as well as their parents and faculties, are unaware of the need for entrepreneurship education.
In one of the recent polls conducted by Skilleit on its social media handle about the right age to nurture an entrepreneurial mindset, 45% of the total participants felt that there is "no age restriction" for having an entrepreneurial mindset. This holds true as the best form of learning knows no age limitation.
However, the earlier you start, the more paths you traverse, and the better it is. Imagine a student who begins an entrepreneurship education to learn an entrepreneurial mindset during their college time. They are deemed to have more experience in starting with the smallest idea. Instead of waiting for someone to give them a job, they become job providers for many others in society. Many crucial years of life go into learning through entrepreneurship as one learns through different case studies or mistakes they make along their journey.
This is where the concept of "Collegepreneur," devised by Skilleit, comes into being. Our programme designed for Collegepreneurs specifically targets the students and faculties of a particular college, a place of higher education, which is one benchmark away from entering a full-time job.
Why is college-based entrepreneurship necessary?
Most college programmes heavily focus on theoretical learning with an emphasis on innovation at times. But the need of the hour today is entrepreneurship-embedded education where practical learning, understanding the issue, customer requirements, and solution skills are taught.
Many countries, like the United States, Israel, etc., have already started incorporating entrepreneurship in early education for students to reap maximum benefits.
These college-based entrepreneurship programmes are necessary as they help in:
Creating and nurturing start-ups: Entrepreneurship programmes have helped students go beyond rote learning or traditional learning methods at colleges and delve more deeply into innovation blended with entrepreneurship for beginning and nurturing their own start-up programs.
Learning problem identification: Most courses delve into problem learning through various case studies. With entrepreneurship development programmes like Collegepreneur provided by Skilleit, students learn about the crucial problem identification method in real life. Such programmes allow the students to solve problems they might never have encountered before.
Problem-solving – Problem-solving is one of the skills that are taught to students from a very young age. But, the problem solving is based on some example or pre-answered model. In real life, this is not the case. Precisely, this is where entrepreneurship programmes for colleges play a big part, as they allow the student to understand their problem and then solve it using brainstorming, MVP (Minimum Viable Product), and much more.
Building more social entrepreneurs- The early teaching about the process of problem identification and solving gives rise to social entrepreneurs in society, who establish a start-up or business based on addressing some existing problem in society. Along with being an enterprise directed for profit, they are also responsible for bringing a positive change to society.
Job generation- Instead of somebody entering the formal employment sector as a job seeker, entrepreneurship empowers the youth to become job givers. Their efforts can act as job multipliers and help strengthen the economy while providing employment to many others in society.
Induces creativity and collaboration- Learning entrepreneurship from an early age enhances students' creativity development as they work on different problems. This also allows them to become more collaborative, developing excellent team skills. This way, they know how to gel different groups of people within a team.
Collegepreneur programs are primarily helpful for –
Students
Training students to become changemakers of tomorrow
Instils 21st-century entrepreneurship skills within students from a young age.
Inspires them to delve into idea generation and develop a suitable start-up or MVP plan for their idea.
Gives them a roadmap about business strategies, challenges, and problems faced in real-life start-up journeys.
Faculties
Training and equipping faculties on Skilleit's game-based tools and techniques to empower them to conduct entrepreneurship programs on their own.
They partake in brainstorming sessions along with students to identify a problem and find an amicable solution to it.
Expose students to fields like innovation, problem-solving, and critical thinking.
Skilleit has been a proud knowledge partner in the College Innovation Ambassador program launched by the Ministry of Education Innovation Cell and the All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) to train faculties across the country. They will introduce the young minds to ideation, IPR, product development, design thinking, problem-solving skills, and critical thinking.
Skilleit has been a proud knowledge partner with the Ministry of Education Innovation Cell in this initiative.
Statistics and Indian Scenario with respect to college-based entrepreneurship education-
In India, entrepreneurship programs are generally inculcated in top premiere government-supported institutions like IITs and IIMs. It would not be uncommon for you to witness that most of the start-ups that are starting in today's time have alumni from these colleges as their founders or co-founders. So, where are we lagging?
Introducing entrepreneurship in the curriculum is not common in standard colleges in India, as one does not have enough resources or capacity to expand their horizon of new course development or equip incubation centres everywhere.
However, the last few years have seen that many colleges have come up with their entrepreneurial cell or incubation centre, which helps coordinate students' ideas. But again, they don't have a robust mechanism and expertise to back many projects at the same time, and hence they lack proper implementation.
As per the data provided by Tracxn (the intelligence firm) and Business Insider, students in the top 10 colleges of India alone have founded more than 4900 start-ups.
One of the surveys conducted by the Reserve Bank of India on around 1246 start-ups found that at least 88% of founders of these start-ups had a bachelor's degree, with a staggering 33.3% of them from engineering backgrounds alone. This has to be percolated to all streams of studies and domains so that no student is left behind.
Skilleit's programs bridge the gap by providing entrepreneurship programs in various colleges and serving all students irrespective of their study background. We have professionally designed an application-based start-up program blended with a game-based approach to making entrepreneurship learning more interactive and immersive for the students and faculties.
Skilleit’s 3 step intervention for Collegepreneurs:
Step 1: Conducting world’s first game-based start-up and entrepreneurship skills program
To nurture the environment of start-up building activity and idea generation, Skilleit has innovated a three-step process for colleges-
We have categorised our highly researched and specially designed programs for students and faculties, all with different purposes. They are all available in online as well as offline modes.
Programs for Students-
Start-up Program Basic: The three-hour live session is conducted for students using the world's first start-up game, Heuristic, where they learn about 13-stages of start-up, challenges, and building strategies.
Start-up Program Foundation- A six-hours program to assist students in generating innovative and exciting start-up ideas. In this foundation course, they learn about idea validation and basic programs along with understanding 13-stages of start-up, challenges, and building strategies through our physical card game Heuristic.
Start-up Program Incubation- The 12-hour course traverses you through the start-up journey, idea generation, validation, innovation, and developing MVP (Minimum Viable Product). This program covers the foundation program along with learning of innovation.
Step 2: Capacity Building and Training of Faculties using world’s first game-based start-up and entrepreneurship program
Faculty training programs are held for capacity building among the faculties. Skilleit specially curates the program for the faculty members on entrepreneurship development which helps them to nurture and handhold the start-ups in the college. The whole idea is to help them through the process of assisting students in generating and validating ideas. The program also covers using the world's first start-up game, Heuristic, for entrepreneurship development and allows them to learn the 13-stage journey of a start-up.
Step 3: Offering a Technical platform for online games, programs, assessments, and support
Skilleit has been proactively supportive of offering technical infrastructure in the form of curriculum design and measures like-
Setting future ready clubs by supporting the establishment and running of e-cell, start-up kit, action plans
Preparing a detailed yearly schedule and guidelines to conduct the activities.
Providing access to portals for learning via gaming models and mentoring students.
Recent Program:
Skilleit has conducted one such session under the Ministry of Education's Innovation Ambassador Training Series Program at Lovely Professional University. The two-day workshop was attended by 100 college professors, where they were trained on Skilleits’ Game-Based Tools and Techniques on how to nurture entrepreneurship among students and handhold them from ideation to scalability.
The session comprised of –
✔️ World’s 1st Start-Game “Heuristic” Session
✔️ Basics of entrepreneurship and the start-up & 13 stage Journey
✔️Idea Generation & validation tools and techniques
✔️Techniques of innovation and developing MVP (prototype)
✔️Tips on Teachers role, Mentoring, Hand Holding and Funding
The faculties engaged in our physical card game, Heuristic, the world’s first start-up game designed to impact an interactive and fun-based learning approach to entrepreneurship development. During the gameplay, the faculty learned multiple ways to help students through the start-up ideas using the idea generation activity and shared knowledge regarding business models and titbits on the start-ups. Such initiatives and workshops would help them assist students in the long term as it would fuel their need to pursue a start-up journey and join an incubation centre hosted by college or other private organisation.
While one cannot deny the importance of theoretical learning, one should also take a more practical approach to imbibe innovation and entrepreneurship-based learning for the holistic growth of students and their career progression.
If you want to assist students from your college with our Collegepreneur program for entrepreneurship value-building and learning programs, please reach out to us via the link - https://www.skilleit.com/registerforfunfilledstart-upprogram or email us at teamskilleit@gmail.com