Engineers in India found more startups than MBA grads. What are B-schools doing to nudge students towards entrepreneurship?

Within the small number of students in India that take up entrepreneurship, engineer-founders dominate the landscape. Graduates from the other islands of educational excellence in the country—B-schools, especially the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs)—have mostly stuck to risk-averse corporate jobs. One would imagine B-school graduates to be at the forefront of setting up new businesses, having soaked up business expertise during their management course. But that’s not the case. Sample this: there are 5,489 start-ups founded by graduates of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs)—Bombay, Delhi, Guwahati, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras, and Roorkee— while graduates of IIMs (Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Calcutta) have produced 1,517 start-ups as of October 10, 2022, per Tracxn data. Of India’s 108 unicorns, 60 have founders from the same set of seven IITs mentioned above while 25 have founders from IIMA, IIMB and IIMC. It would be accurate to say that there are way more engineer-founders in the country today than manager-founders.

While management graduates taking to entrepreneurship straight out of college may continue to be a small number for the foreseeable future, B-schools are not immune to the charms of the start-up space. “We decided some years ago that every MBA student at IIMB needs to develop an entrepreneurial orientation,” says Rishikesha T. Krishnan, Director of IIMB. Bhagwan Chowdhry, Faculty Director of I-Venture@ISB, the start-up accelerator and incubator of the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, says that ISB was started 20 years ago with the idea of preparing managers to work for the Amazons and Googles. “Now, we notice that many of our alumni graduate from those corporate jobs, and start companies of their own. Today, entrepreneurship is a big piece of business education,” he adds. Great Lakes’ mission is to develop future-ready business leaders as well as entrepreneurs. “We want to participate in the start-up ecosystem. Entrepreneurship is a core part of our curriculum,” says Suresh Ramanathan, Dean of Chennai-based Great Lakes Institute of Management.

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The way they look at it, it’s not necessarily about producing start-up founders and certainly not right after B-school. But it’s about creating a problem-solving mindset among students and showing them that they do not have to limit themselves to working for large corporates. And the institutes are stepping up their efforts to inspire entrepreneurial thinking. For instance, The IIMAvericks Fellowship Program, launched by IIMA in 2012-13, pays final-year students deciding to become entrepreneurs a salary for two years. If their start-up doesn’t work out, they can come back and sit for placements again. ISB has launched a similar one-year scholarship for students interested in entrepreneurship from the class of 2023. IIMB—which is located in India’s start-up capital of Bengaluru—introduced a compulsory course on entrepreneurship a few years ago, has an active entrepreneurship club, gets students to work with the companies incubated on campus, and offers deferred placements. Great Lakes—which has seen healthy enrolments for the entrepreneurship courses introduced last year—is also exploring start-up scholarships. But the professors admit that adoption is very low. “I won’t say that there’s a large number of current students who are interested [in the scholarship programme]. But there are many others in whom we are planting the seeds, because we know they will be back in this game five years from now,” says Chowdhry.