Rajiv Vaid Basaiawmoit

Entrepreneurship and Innovation can sometimes be very nebulous concepts and the way they are taught are often as diverse the diversity of entrepreneurial ventures themselves. There are many approaches to teach Entrepreneurship and many an educator have champion the dogmatic approach (also known as “my way or the highway” approach) – i.e. run by a central dogma that they themselves believe in or are convinced is the best way to teach Entrepreneurship. Dogmas such as the “Lean Startup” or “Agile” learning etc. are plenty to be found. However, the diversity of entrepreneurial ventures, industry areas and personalities apart from uncertain market conditions, unpredictable conditions and the inevitable element of chance means that being dogmatic is probably not the best way to teach entrepreneurship. As you inadvertently may be setting up the student/learner for failure. It is often said that the “road to hell is paved with good intentions” 

Thus, my solution to this is to take a more realist as well as constructivist approach to teach the diversity of entrepreneurial approaches. Expose students to a myriad of approaches, build up their entrepreneurial self-efficacy and teach them to how to navigate uncertainty and limited information spaces and we increase their odds of success.

I take a specialist stance to teaching students and professionals from the Natural Sciences. My vision here is to create Entrepreneurial Scientists first, i.e. model the students/professionals to become excellent yet “entrepreneurial” scientists. From this larger pool, can one then direct or see a smaller sub-pool of “Scientific Entrepreneurs”. Secondly, encouraging scientists to actively use their domain knowledge by integrating it with entrepreneurship ensures that you have a healthy balance of both experience and exploration.

Finally, I believe in teaching using game & play based techniques as retention as well as transformation is amplified 10 fold with this.