Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Professional Colleges: Opportunities and Challenges

Rapid growth in innovative and creative ideas coupled with various platforms for promoting new ideas is increasingly rising in Professional colleges across India. The growth of Unicorns in India has further led to students and youngsters coming with good entrepreneurial ideas. In order to promote the spirit of Entrepreneurship in the campus, premium institutes have tied up with Government agencies and also incubation centres. It is also clear that globally entrepreneur communities have thrived in ecosystems consciously built around their needs. These observations led to the research initiative to identify the factors that have a direct impact on building an ecosystem that would foster successful entrepreneurial initiatives while the students are still in the campus. The Entrepreneurship Ecosystem refers to the elements, which typically includes individuals, organisations outside the individual entrepreneur that are favourable or unfavourable to the choice of a person to become an entrepreneur, or the probabilities of success following launch. These institutions have an interest in there being more entrepreneurship in the region. The decision to become an entrepreneur is driven by factors which are a combination of both intrinsic and extrinsic elements while it is easier to understand the impact of intrinsic factors like demand and supply, competition etc., the impact of environmental factors is not a well understood area. Documented research explicitly acknowledges the role of external factors, but does not provide deep enough pointers on the influence of such factors influencing entrepreneurship. Across the world, there is a clear need to develop the ecosystem to foster greater entrepreneurship success. The Silicon Valley success story in terms of promoting new business ventures has been attributed to the existence of favourable environmental factors.