Let college students run businesses: S Gopalakrishnan

S Gopalakrishnan, executive vice-chairman and one of the seven founders of Infosys, has urged entrepreneurship be developed in colleges. In his keynote address at the valedictory function of Pan IIT Alumni Leadership Series 2013, organised here by Indian Institute of Technology-Madras on Saturday, he said Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg started their businesses as students.

“Age is not a barrier. In engineering colleges, allow students to start businesses in the second year, so they have three years to run these. They could combine a real life problem by being an entrepreneur while doing engineering,” he said. It is safe to fail as a student because there are no implications in real life, less people dependent on you and this is the time for experiments, he said, adding one could learn everything about doing business than just theory or reading textbooks.

He noted, Kerala University is doing as part of their curriculum. A students gets 20% waiver in attendance to run a business and four per cent grace marks. Every student now wants to be a start up engineer.

For a venture capitalist, it is cheaper to fund a student whose expectations are lower.

Gopalakrishnan went on to say that "we have to rethink what we are doing today. We have to reengineer, reinvent for the 21st century. I believe India can contribute back to the world new models, new pedagogy and new solutions".

He added, it is not about IT alone, our cities need to reengineered, public transport system should be encouraged. Healthcare, education, urban design, buildings. "We need a better model for everything in our life. This is what colleges can challenge their students with. This will make classrooms more interesting, and they will actually solve real life problems and contributing back to the society, " said Gopalakrishnan.

Currently there is a disconnect and it is now not just about what is being taught and what is needed but we need to think about future and this is an opportunity for India to reinvent and contribute back to the world. Every single aspect of the life need to reinvented and reengineered for the 21st century. This includes management principles. How do we bring this to classroom.

In the 20th century, teachers were to transfer knowledge from a printed material. In the 21st century, students have lot more knowledge or more or less equally than the teachers as most of them is available on the Internet.