ENTREPRENEURSHIP AS A PART OF FORMAL EDUCATION SYSTEM

*Ms. Rashmi S.B

**Mrs. V. Jyothsna

ABSTRACT

“More than 1 billion people today are between 15 and 25 years of age and nearly 40 per cent of
the world’s population are below the age of 20. Eighty-five per cent of these young people live in
developing countries where many are especially vulnerable to extreme poverty.
The ILO estimates that around 74 million young women and men are unemployed throughout the
world, accounting for 41 per cent of all 180 million unemployed1 persons globally. These figures
do not take into consideration worldwide underemployed (estimated at 310 million).
In the closing decades of the 20th century, entrepreneurship gained increased recognition among
economics as a significant driver of improvements in societal welfare. Across the globe,
government have acknowledged the importance of their roles in motivating individuals,
businesses and related stakeholders to perceive and develop new opportunities that can promote
positive change and create economic growth in their societies. It has seen as the main source of
innovations in nearly all industries, leading to the birth of new entrepreneurship and the growth
and renewal of established organizations.
Entrepreneurship is becoming a popular career choice these days among aspirants and in an
endeavor to cater to this growing demand, many institutions are making ‘entrepreneurship
education’ a part of their curriculum. Entrepreneurship education seeks to provide students with
the knowledge, skills and motivation required to encourage entrepreneurial success and lay down
the conditions and solutions to the challenges that one might foresee in a venture.
This paper provides a basis for understanding the importance of Entrepreneurship as a part of
formal education system in the present scenario.

Key words – Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship education and training, Benefits of

entrepreneurship education.

ADDRESS

V V N –INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT, TECHNOLOGY AND RESEARCH,

# 3, VANI VILAS ROAD, V.V. PURAM, BANGALORE -04.

INTRODUCTION
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“Business is the backbone of a country’s economy and entrepreneurship is a tremendous force
that has a huge impact on facilitating growth, recovery and societal progress. It results in
innovation, employment generation and social empowerment. In India, entrepreneurship
education is gradually picking up and it needs to scale up further to make everyone involved –
promoters, investors, parents, employees, etc - more aware about the different aspects.”
“The current educational system in India is more degree oriented instead of employment. We
often find parents complaining about how their children dislike attending colleges and are
happier spending hours outside the colleges. The problem lies in the way education is being
instructed, subjects are taught in a push model.”
Today’s age of information where there is a lot of organized information/data generated, we are
lacking in a skilled manpower. India is all set to become a knowledge capital of the world;
however, we don’t have an institution imparting knowledge-based education, which are very
industry- driven and more practical.
There is a need of 3D integrated approach involving the vocational institutes, corporate and the
government to provide employability skills to every citizen, which are creating a bridge between
the classroom teaching and the boardroom practicability,”
India is a fast developing country and a lot is being planned and done to ensure the growing
population gets good education facilities, becomes more employable and is prepared to be a part
of the revolution.
In recent years, it has become fashionable to view entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship
education as the panacea for stagnating or declining economic activity in both developed and
developing countries (Matlay, 2001). Similarly, in economies in transition, entrepreneurial
education has become an integral part of the new curriculum on offer in both private and state
sponsored business schools (Li and Matlay, 2005). Interestingly, entrepreneurship education is
also promoted as an effective way to facilitate the transition of a growing graduate population
from education and into work (Matlay and Westhead, 2005). For these and a range of other
socio-economic and politically expedient reasons, entrepreneurship education has nudged itself
to the top of the political agenda and it is currently a high priority item of policy throughout the
industrially developed and developing world (Mitra and Matlay, 2004).

ENTREPRENEURS
Entrepreneurs are identified as decision maker under uncertainty, the one who does things in a
better way, as the one who always searchers for change, respond to it and exploits it as an
opportunity. They are the people who have the ability to see and evaluate business opportunities;
together the necessary resources to take the advantage of them; and to initiate appropriate action
to ensure success”. Entrepreneurs must deal with uncertainty and innovation and do so in a
competitive environment with inaccurate information. Entrepreneurs are an important
destabilizing force in the economy, while their other characteristic of utilizing perception for
adjusting to change, desire for high achievement may help to provide stability.
An entrepreneur creating something new with value by devoting the necessary time and effort,
assuming and accompanying financial, psychic and social risk and receiving the resulting
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rewards of monetary and personal satisfaction and independence is the whole set process of
entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is the practice of starting new organizations, particularly new
businesses generally in response to identified opportunities.
ROLE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION AND TRAINING IN ECONOMIC
DEVELOPMENT
It is an accepted fact that economic development is the key to addressing problems of poverty,
crime, disease, social & political ills. Role of economic development involves more than just
increasing per capita output and income. Entrepreneurship has been assessed as a driving force
of: Initiating & constituting change in the structure of business and society. It facilitates
structural formation of countries from low income, primary sector based societies into high
income services and technology based services, decentralization, Economic re-structuring and
movement in the direction of market economy and employment generation.
Entrepreneurship also facilitates innovations in - new products with little technological change,
new products with technological advancements and new products with some change. It creates
new capacities into the market and through the improvement of competitiveness of the economy.
Increase in export activities. Increase in GDP, increase in quality of life, increase in societal
wealth and creation of added value is possible only through entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship
is a matter of culture or matter of state of mind – create entrepreneurial culture within countries,
societies, firms, association and so on, and of to change the mindset of individuals. Culture and
state of mind could be mainly approached in terms of values, beliefs and attitudes.
Entrepreneurship is also a matter of behavior – opportunity orientation, commitment to
opportunity orientation, commitment of resources and so on.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION AND TRAINING
Entrepreneurial education is a fast growing area in colleges and universities of study among
collegiate business students all over the world in an endeavor to cater to this growing demand.
Many universities and institutions offer at least one course in undergraduate & post graduate
level and have made “Entrepreneurship Education and Training” a part of their curriculum.
Entrepreneurship education can be defined as the whole set of activities aiming to provide the
budding entrepreneurs with the knowledge, skills, motivation required to encourage
entrepreneurial success, nurturing the personal qualities by enhancing their creativity, spirit of
initiative, responsibility, capacity of confronting risks and independence. Entrepreneurship
training is all about building knowledge, skills and attitude for a new venture creation.
Aspirants in this area may participate in entrepreneurship education; training and development
programmes at various points in their lives, and this education, training and development may
take different forms. Entrepreneurship includes, for instance, planning, organising, analysing,
communicating, doing, debriefing, evaluating and recording progress in learning. This set of
“management competences” is relevant in private life for managing one’s household etc. as well
as for business, and also for participation in society. Other important aspects of entrepreneurship
that are obviously equally relevant in all three areas of life include, among others, identifying
one’s personal strengths and weaknesses, displaying pro-active behaviour, being curious and

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creative, understanding risk, responding positively to changes and the disposition to show
initiatives.
Keeping in mind the broad definition and the components of entrepreneurship, it could be easily
demonstrated that schools are dealing with entrepreneurship at all stages, though usually
beginning with the more general skills and competences at primary school level and later adding
the more specific concept of training on how to create a business particularly at upper secondary
level. However, entrepreneurship education is not only a matter of schools.
As opposed to the teaching of subjects such as accountancy and finance, where colleges
generally have a monopoly, there is a strong influence on developing entrepreneurship from the
perspective of non-formal and informal education. Contributions from outside B-Schools and
closer cooperation between schools and other institutions therefore deserve special attention.
As entrepreneurship education is normally expressed in framework curricula as a cross curricular
objective, there are several factors that affect its successful implementation at school level.
Coherent policies are needed in order to support cooperation between different sectors involved
at all levels of decision making and administration.
Entrepreneurship education is different from a typical business education. Business entry is a
fundamentally different activity from managing a business. EE must address the equivocal nature
of business entry. To this end, the EE must include skill-building courses in negotiation,
leadership, new product development, creative thinking and exposure to technology innovation.
Other areas identified as important for EE include an awareness of entrepreneur career options;
sources of venture capital; idea protection; ambiguity tolerance. These are characteristics that
define the entrepreneurial personality from which one draws when faced with the challenges
associated with each stage of venture development. The following learning tools are useful in
EE: business plans; student business start-ups; consultation with practicing entrepreneurs;
computer simulations; behavioral simulations; interviews with entrepreneurs, environmental
scans; “live” cases; field trips, and the use of video and films. In the educational field,
entrepreneurship is often understood within the narrow meaning of the term and therefore it
suffers from a certain image problem, which mainly results from falsely narrowing down
‘entrepreneurship’ to ‘running a business, being an employer/self-employed’.
Schools and individuals in the educational field often do not see it as their task to prepare pupils
for running a business, but rather to provide them with basic competences for a successful life.
This section of this paper comprises a short outline of entrepreneurship as a key competence in a
broad sense and as an important personal quality crucial for the ability to manage one’s life. The
etymology gives the direction for a more suitable interpretation: In French, from which the
English expression originates, “entreprendre” means “to undertake, to take the initiative”. In
Greek, entrepreneurship refers to “an exercise of a combined use of various means (e.g.
initiative, physical resources, etc.) and systematic effort towards achieving an objective.
Within the framework of key competences, entrepreneurship is not seen as a distinct
psychological variable but rather interplay of different skills, knowledge, affective factors and
personal qualities. The combination of such competences is, among others, an inevitable
precondition for successful entrepreneurs, but it is also obvious that each individual has the need
for those competences in order to manage his or her personal life. The term entrepreneurship is
therefore used to label a certain set of competences necessary and useful for everyone.
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WHAT IS ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION?
Entrepreneurship education seeks to prepare people, especially youth, to be responsible,
enterprising individuals who become entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial thinkers and who
contribute to economic development and sustainable communities. It is not based on a textbook
course. Instead, students are immersed in real life learning experiences where they have an
opportunity to take risks, manage the results, and learn from the outcomes.
Entrepreneurship education is not just about teaching someone to run a business. It is also about
encouraging creative thinking and promoting a strong sense of self worth and accountability.
Through entrepreneurship education, students learn how to create a business, but they also learn
a lot more. The core knowledge created via entrepreneurship education includes:
• The ability to recognize opportunities in one’s life.
• The ability to pursue such opportunities by generating new ideas and marshaling needed
resources.
• The ability to create and operate a new venture.
• The ability to think in a creative and critical manner.
WHY ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION?
These limitations are unfortunate, because the benefits of entrepreneurship education for
individuals, communities, and the entire country are profound. The benefits include the
following:
• Entrepreneurship Education inspires and motivates students to achieve while in school
and use their knowledge in a real world setting.
• Entrepreneurship Education improves school performance and can help achieve No Child
Left Behind (NCLB) goals and the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) measures.
• Entrepreneurship Education builds a pipeline that creates productive and thoughtful
citizens who contribute to local, regional, and national competitiveness.
1) Improving Student Performance
Engaging youth—especially disadvantaged youth---remains a significant challenge for
America’s educators. Entrepreneurship education is one tool that can help educators reach out to
kids who lack interest in traditional learning models or approaches. In fact, students of all kinds,
from the disaffected to the gifted and talented, can be motivated to dream big dreams and work
to make them happen.
Entrepreneurship Education provides activities that build relationships, provide relevance for
learning, and encourage rigor in the effort to develop academic skills to be competitive.
2) Upgrading School Performance
By improving student performance, entrepreneurship education also contributes to improving the
overall quality of colleges. At the most basic level, students enrolled in these programs are less
likely to be truant or to drop out of school. These programs can also help schools comply with
various requirements such as those found in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law by actively
engaging all students in the education process. Educators are finding that entrepreneurship
training encourages youth to employ sophisticated accountancy and financial concepts in real-
life situations. This training leads to greater interest as well as improved performance in all the
aspects.
3) Enhancing Economic Competitiveness
Entrepreneurs are the engines of Nation’s economy, accounting for the vast majority of new job
creation and the development of new innovations. Entrepreneurs can develop and thrive
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anywhere. Some people just have it! But, for the rest of us, training, support and education help.
Individuals who receive entrepreneurship training---at all ages--- are more likely to start a
business, and, most importantly, to sustain and grow a business. And, these companies are the
Cornerstone of future economic growth, job creation, and wealth generation.
The rest of the world understands the power of entrepreneurs and the usefulness of
entrepreneurship education. In the past decade, nearly every member of the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has unveiled a new national entrepreneurship
initiative. Many OECD countries include entrepreneurship in their national education curricula.
These efforts are starting to pay off, as worldwide entrepreneurship rates are beginning to climb.
America has long enjoyed a strong climate for entrepreneurship, but this competitive advantage
is beginning to erode. We can continue to assume that past patterns will continue, or we can
invest in efforts that support the next generation of entrepreneurs. At the Consortium, we believe
in the inherent competitive strengths of the American economy. But, we also believe that it
makes sense to “prime the pump” by expanding training and educational opportunities for those
who want to learn more about becoming an entrepreneur.
Changing the culture in every community to recognize the entrepreneurial opportunities in each
local area will make all states stronger. These small but critical investments can pay big
dividends in future economic prosperity.
Conclusion
Entrepreneurship has a passive and an active component: the propensity to induce changes
oneself, but also the ability to welcome and support innovation brought about by external factors
by welcoming change, taking responsibility for one’s actions, positive or negative, to finish what
we start, to know where we are going, to set objectives and meet them, and have the motivation
to succeed.
Key competences represent a transferable, multifunctional package of knowledge, skills and
attitudes that all individuals need for personal fulfillment and development, inclusion and
employment. These should have been developed by the end of compulsory school or training,
and should act as a foundation for further learning as part of Lifelong Learning.
From this outline it becomes clear that entrepreneurship education is very much essential for the
overall development of a nation.

References:
1. www.entre-ed.org
2. International Entrepreneurship Education: Issues and Newness.
3. B - Schools nurture students for entrepreneurship, The Economic Times.
4. Entrepreneurship and Corporate Venturing by Renu Arora and S.K. Sood.
5. Dynamics of Entrepreneurship Development and Management by Vasant Desai.