In an ambitious plan to boost entrepreneurship in the state, the Gujarat Technological University (GTU) is set to train around 100,000 students in launching startups through a three year program.
The ambitious three year program is structured to help students gain gradually all the skills they need to launch their startups, build their products & safeguard their intellectual property rights. This will be first time in India that academic credits will be provided for students for working on their startups and bring the startup entrepreneurs form the fringes of the academic systems into the main classrooms.
According to Akshai Aggarwal, Vice-Chancellor of GTU, more than 100 engineering colleges across the state are implementing the program. The program has been baked into the academic processes to provide ample time for students to devote for their startup projects. The academic credits have also been provided to students for the startup activities under the program.
Under the program, students begin with design orientation right from the introductory subjects in the first year. In the second year, they begin using ideation methodologies, developed by educationists during the last decade while they take up simple system design problems.
As they progress and learn engineering subjects of analysis, materials and systems, the design-orientation is embedded into the syllabi.
During the summer, the students are required to make research journeys, called shodh yatras, into industries -usually SMEs, to scout for problems, which can improve a product or a process. Students are encouraged to take up such problems as their Final Year projects.
About 3,000 Faculty Members from all over the state have participated in workshops for IPR. Hundreds of them are going through workshops for developing appropriate methodologies for different disciplines for the subject of design engineering. What's more, the program is structured to push students through the design thinking, market research, problem identification & solution conceptualization through the first & second year of the program, culminating in the final year where students build & commercialize the product. New frameworks for design thinking, ideation and product development tools have been adopted from Stanford University & Openfuel.
