Symbiosis begins MBA course in Innovation & Intrapreneurship

Part of initiative to boost entrepreneurship among students

With corporates increasingly focusing on innovation and setting up research & development centres, access to such talent is becoming crucial. Keeping this in mind Symbiosis Institute of Business Management Pune, today announced launch of a two year MBA course in Innovation & Intrapreneurship.

The course that has begun from this academic year will attract a fee of Rs  4.9 lakh and has a batch size of 40 students.

“We received about 600 applications but we decided to keep the batch size small because we want a certain mind-set of students only being part of this. They need to be able to think out of the box and have an aptitude for critical thinking,” said Vidya Yeravdekar, principal director, Symbiosis.

The course is part of the initiative taken by the institute to propagate entrepreneurship among students.

Other than the MBA course, and an incubation centre called the SIBM Innovation and Venture Incubation Centre, it will also introduce innovation as subject in other disciplines.

Under the incubation programme the institute is providing basic infrastructure, access to faculty and alumni for mentorship and also access to funds. “Our long term intent is to perhaps convert this into a section 95 company so that we can hold equity in start-ups, which will also means they having the availability to get access to seed funding,” said Yeravdekar.

She believes intrapreneurship is a new concept, which allows one to think differently in an existing business set-up. “It will mean how you can be important for the organisation, how can you increase productivity and look at the organisation as your own. It’s about being an entrepreneur within the organization,” she added.

She also stressed that the course was the result of their study of what corporate want. “If you look around, majority of corporates today have an innovation centre which looks at what they would like to be in the next 5-10 years. We felt there is a need to develop people or group of student whom we can train in innovation and who can then work in these innovation centres or may work at corporate at any level but have the ability to think differently,” added Yeravdekar.

“We conducted a small research among our students and figured that many do want to be entrepreneurs. We also found that after six to seven years in their professional life several of our alumni have set-up companies. And this number goes up to almost 300 companies,” she added.