In a discussion with over 400 young members of an entrepreneurship group in Mumbai, an interesting question came up even as we were discussing models and opportunities for entrepreneurial success in the current economic crisis. What is the formula for a successful entrepreneur ?is it the ability to create, the ability to innovate or the ability to improvise? And what role does quality education or the lack of it play in creating a fearless and imaginative entrepreneur?
A recent post on the vibrant mail group of India?s Higher Education Forum talks about Bret Taylor, who majored in computer science student at Stanford, joined Google, created Google Maps and later turned entrepreneur by starting Friendfeed which was acquired by Facebook. Today he is the CTO at Facebook. The founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg created the company from his Harvard dormitory, and after the social networking website exploded in popularity, he quit school with great alacrity and became a full-time entrepreneur.
The list of Fortune 500 CEOs who dropped out of high school or university and went on to become self-made billionaires, includes Bill Gates of Microsoft, Larry Page of Google, Michael Dell of Dell, Steve Jobs of Apple, Richard Branson of Virgin, Ralph Lauren of Ralph Lauren and Jerry Yang of Yahoo. And nobody is sure if Ford founder Henry Ford ever had any formal education, outside his training as a machinist.
There are many companies in America?s entrepreneurial hotbed Silicon Valley whose founders are entrepreneurs who are in mid-20s or early 30s running start-ups with billion dollar valuations. The interesting point made by our higher education colleague is that most of these companies have great engineering talent from India and China. And in case any reader of this column wonders if there is a strong case for not completing education, the Nasscom Executive Council is full of IITans and quite a few who then went on to graduate school in technology and management and graduated with flying colours before starting and building successful companies. So is the CII National Council in case any of you wondered if there were differences between the technology sector and the more traditional building blocks of the Indian economy.
My hypothesis is that there is really everything to be gained by embarking on and completing a focused education programme. The problem in our country has been that young bright minds enter programmes for which they neither have aptitude nor interest and in many cases the academic environment tends to be so stifling and strait jacketed that any spark of interest in the joy of learning is snuffed out by obsolete courses and uninspiring pedagogy. It may be unrealistic to expect that the plethora of engineering colleges and private universities in the country would have the wherewithal to select candidates based on aptitude and design courses to equip them with skills in contemporary technology areas.
However it is sad to interview candidates graduating from three and four year programmes in IT and find that they have little or no familiarity with contemporary trends like cloud computing, SaaS and PaaS technologies and processes etc. The same logic extends to management students who still spout Kotler but have no real knowledge of digital marketing, e-commerce and m-commerce.
There is one way to bridge the deep abyss that exists between current reality and industry expectations. Virtuous partnerships between academic institutions and state-of-art technology firms could enable both aptitude testing before assigning students to programmes and laboratories created within engineering and management campuses by the private sector which could initially provide technologies and skills to familiarise faculty and students with contemporary technology thinking and eventually become sites for collaborative research and even apps development by young fertile minds who would have the time and the enthusiasm to do leading edge work and create entrepreneurial opportunities for themselves and their colleagues when they graduate.
What the industry and indeed all industry sectors in India needs as we try to recover from the shocks of the latter half of 2011 and return to an 8%GDP growth pattern soon is a host of entrepreneurs imbued with the spirit of creativity and trained with the capabilities to build and grow companies. These companies cannot be me-toos or try to copy an old business models. On the contrary they need to look for entrepreneurial niches, assemble innovative teams and get enough capital to convert ideas into organisations.
What is needed in 2012 is at least a hundred such companies taking flight and making venture capitalists proud and at least half that number moving from successful start-ups to solid scaled companies which would give the somewhat harassed private equity firms something to smile about again. Indian entrepreneurs have shown this capability in the past and surely will find the capability again!
The writer is vice-chairman & CEO of Zensar Technologies and co-chair of the National Knowledge Council of the CII