An entrepreneurship revolution is slowly being nurtured in classrooms with new start-ups mushrooming on college campuses around the city.
Currently, there are 62 startups in colleges, which are being nurtured by the institutes along with the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN), said Vishnu Priya, senior manager (consulting) of NEN in Chennai.
NEN aims at penetrating classrooms to nurture young entrepreneurs. They have been successful to an extent with the help of entreprenuership cells in the colleges. These cells help kick start the entrepreneurship spirit among college students with the help of faculties.
Interestingly, some colleges like MOP Vaishnav College have been in the forefront in nurturing young entreprenuers, said Rosy Frenando, a former head of the Department of Commerce in the college and now an NEN consultant.
She said MOP Vaishnav College pioneered the programme on entreprenuership on campus.
“The focus was to educate faculty in colleges so that they can speak about entrepreneurship education. We trained the faculty, who in turn, identified student-entrepreneur leaders in a bid to ignite the thought of entrepreneurship among students,” said Rosy during a entrepreneurship workshop on the campus.
Interestingly, MOP has a series of start-ups, which include floral bouquets, MOP Health and Beauty (beauty parlour) and MOP Beyond Breads (Cafeteria). “All these happened through incubation,” said Rosy.
Interestingly, the initiative is no cakewalk for NEN as there are numerous challenges faced by the proponents of entrepreneurship in institutes. Sometimes, it is the parents who want their children to focus more on studies rather than on trying to be an entrepreneur and at times it is the institute which is afraid that the students would fare poorly in the exams.
But then, NEN along with the Tatas, have been successful in kindling the entrepreneurship spirit among youngsters. “Across the nation, we have nearly 461 start-ups,” said Priya.
To a query on the lifespan of these start-ups, Priya said that it is hard to come up with a figure.
“On an average, some have a lifespan of two to three years and some have mushroomed into big firms providing employment to many people,” she says.
“The question is not how many are successful. The aim is to nurture the youngsters in entrepreneurship besides equipping them to face the challenges in the real life,” Priya added.
And, it is not only in MOP Vaishnav, but also in other colleges such as KCG College of Technology, Ethiraj College, Women’s Christian College and Shahsul Jain College, that start-ups are mushrooming, Rosy added.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Cities>Chennai / by C Shivakumar – Chennai / May 15th, 2013