Entrepreneurship is the buzzword now and Indians, unfortunately, have not made much impact on this front despite possessing sufficient knowledge and making huge strides in the IT sector across the world.

Gurram Srinivas Reddy, a first generation entrepreneur who formed Telugu Entrepreneurs’ Association (TEA) in the U.S. to promote entrepreneurs among Telugus, recently received Excellence Award at the North America Telugu Association (NATA), 2014 meet. A Hyderabadi by heart, he tells R. Ravikanth Reddy that its time engineering colleges provide platform to encourage entrepreneurs among students than just churning out degree holders.

How should engineering or management students go about developing entrepreneurship skills while in college?

First they should offer more courses in entrepreneurship and then conduct workshops by inviting industry experts in chosen fields. Invite first generation entrepreneurs as a motivational speakers and role models.

No, there has to be a paradigm shift in the approach of the educational institutions. An institution can create such environment just like Telugu Entrepreneurs’ Association (TEA) does by inviting open competition for students to prepare business plans, preparing best business practices, inviting bankers and venture capitalists to institutions as judges of those business plans. This will give an opportunity for students to interact with experts. TEA does all these activities as part of fostering entrepreneurship among Telugus around the world on a regular basis.

Entrepreneurs have to be a dreamers and when they dream, they have to dream big. There a big difference between businessmen and entrepreneurs. A businessman always thinks of profit. Most of them are not dreamers and there won’t be much of innovation in what they do. On the other hand, entrepreneurs always come up with new ideas and their approach always deals with improving peoples’ or end users’ lives.

If you take last 20 years, new innovations in Information Technology have helped in improving productivity and changing the loves of end users or customers. There is so much productivity growth in many industry sectors and all this was possible because of the entrepreneurs.

For example, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Steve Jobs of Apple, Micheal Dell of Dell computers, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook have several things in common, they all are young and they wanted to change the world using technology to help all the human beings. They also started their entrepreneurial activity at a very young age. They had some idea about their products and they worked on it day and night without giving up. Also, they never lost focus or hope and started developing their products from their garages and they did whatever it took. None of these people have rich background.

All the students must do internship in their chosen industry as part of their course. By doing this, students will have firsthand experience out there in the real world and they will know dos and don’ts of the entrepreneurship.

There is no instant success to anything that we do. One should have a complete belief and trust in himself no matter what they go through. They should just move on. One should have the tenacity, perseverance and stubbornness to make it happen.

The mistake is to not dream, to not have self confidence, discipline, self control, developing skills, and to not have proper role models as they do not read bios of some of these successful entrepreneurs.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Hyderabad / by R. Ravikanth Reddy / August 17th, 2014