IITs, IIMs breed business startups

Sudhir Chowdhary & Srinivas R (Express India) write about the startups being breeded in IIT-Delhi and IIM-Bangalore.

@ IIT Delhi
* Nine Cloud Entertainments is working on animation and other entertainment projects.
* SeNate Communications is developing firewall security solutions
*Voice Tech Solutions provides IT solutions to the telecom companies

@ IIM Bangalore
* Meta-I - Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Education Support Services Company
* EmbedX - working on embedded systems on vehicle tracking.

Rashmi Bansal (Business World India) has written a wonderful article - can Business Schools really 'teach' entrepreneurship. It covers some successful examples and also the gaps in various areas :

Originally, entrepreneurship courses were meant to literally 'produce entrepreneurs'. In 1947, Harvard Business School (HBS) developed an elective titled 'Management of Small Enterprises' for students eager to start their own businesses after World War II. The real thrust into teaching and research in the area came in the early 1980s when HBS graduate and pioneering venture capitalist Arthur Rock funded the first professorship in the field of entrepreneurship at HBS.

Under legendary Professor Howard H. Stevenson, entrepreneurship came to be defined not just as an 'innate trait' but a particular type of managerial behaviour available to virtually all managers in organisations of all kinds and sizes. Today HBS requires its 900 first-year students to take a course called 'The Entrepreneurial Manager', and offers almost 20 elective courses in the area to its second-year students. American B-schools, including the likes of Wharton, offer entrepreneurial management as a major, "preparing students for careers as autonomous entrepreneurs, family-business entrepreneurs, or entrepreneurs in corporate setting". Entrepreneurship centres have also become an integral feature at campuses in the US, thanks to corporates and individuals who are keen to fund them. The University of Michigan, for example, got $10 million to set up such a centre in 1999.

In contrast, Indian B-schools have made a more modest foray into entrepreneurship education. Every self-respecting B-school offers at least one elective in the area as part of the second year of the postgraduate programme (PGP). And interest from students is high. At IIM Lucknow, the 'New Venture Planning' (NVP) course has seen an enrolment as high as 70 per cent in some years. The course gives perspectives from all functional areas like marketing, finance, operations, strategy and also preparation of business plans. IIM Bangalore offers as many as four electives covering the entire gamut - from the regulation 'Managing New Ventures' to the gung-ho 'Entrepreneurship from the Trenches: A Real World Perspective'. Further, a course in 'Social Entrepreneurship' is being introduced. In March 2002, IIM-B set up the Nadathur S. Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL) with a generous grant from N.S. Raghavan, one of the co-founders of Infosys Technologies (See 'Incubation, The New Buzzword').

* List - India Business Incubators *
* NSRCEL : Ideas to Implementation
* Incubetees at KreSIT