Faculty development programme + NEN
CHITRA V. RAMANI
|
The aim is to produce teachers who will create world-class entrepreneurs
|
The importance of entrepreneurship cannot be emphasised more in the present context. NASSCOM and CII have estimated that if India has to become a developed country by 2020, as many as 10 million jobs will have to be created.
The National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) is a not-for-profit programme that is aimed at launching the next generation of entrepreneurs in India.
NEN recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, to expand its programme on entrepreneurship faculty education. With this, IIMB’s Nadathur S. Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning is partnering NEN and Stanford University’s Stanford Technology Ventures Programme in anchoring the “Entrepreneurship Educators Course”. The course was originally launched by NEN in partnership with Stanford University’s Stanford Technology Ventures Programme (STVP).
Critical input
As a result of the MoU, IIMB will now join NEN as a partner in EEC along with Stanford. The IIMB partnership will help provide critical input on overall EEC course design, content, teaching and certification, along with physical infrastructure. Through the partnership, NEN will work closely with IIM-B and STVP to being important knowledge and skills to the faculty participants, with an aim to launch a pool of world-class entrepreneurship educators in the country.
“Entrepreneurship is a new discipline for 80 per cent of the campuses here. The faculty too has to learn. EEC is a rigorous course which provides a base of concepts and introduces the faculty to cutting-edge technologies,” said Laura Parkin, Executive Director, NEN.
Tina Seelig, Executive Director, STVP, said, “Something like entrepreneurship cannot be taught in a classroom – it has to be experienced. In EEC, we follow the same principle. We throw a lot of problems at the faculty and participants and ask them to come up with solutions.”
About one such “problem”, she said that the pieces of four jigsaw puzzles were all mixed in a bag. The jumbled pieces were distributed to five teams of the faculty participants in the three-day module that concluded on June 28. “It was interesting. One team decided to tackle the problem by becoming brokers! They actually made more money when compared to the other teams.”
“It is critical to see what the top faculty in the country is doing. It is important to inject international practices into the Indian entrepreneurship ecosystem. Entrepreneurship makes one work outside their comfort zone. It is important to get out there,” said Ms. Parkin. As many as 250 faculty participants have so far benefited from the programme.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Education Plus
Karnataka
Chennai
Hyderabad
