Explore, Engage, Empower

As a country, India faces intertwined economic and social challenges. The solution to our economic and social challenges is creating a viable and sustainable economy that creates large scale employment without depending only upon the government and multinationals.

We urgently need a new engine of economic growth that can transcend the Indian economy into a US$5 Trillion economy.? And there is general agreement as to what that new economy must be based on. Two words: ENTREPRENEURSHIP & INNOVATION (Ref my earlier article https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/innovation-entrepreneurship-its-either-pankaj-thakar/?trackingId=AtYoTF5NQlWVBiQ3f5ZRpQ%3D%3D)

Our challenges as a country, the plethora of problems across the spectrum gives us a huge? opportunity to INNOVATE for solving those problems. We have all the ingredients to become the country that leads the way in developing the new innovative technologies to solve diverse problems. We have to become the country that creates the new and better products, processes, and services that other countries want and need. Hence, WE MUST INNOVATE AND CREATE MORE ENTREPRENEURS!

The question is HOW and WHERE do we start from? In their book ‘That Used to Be U’s, Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum summarize our challenge today:

Going forward, we are convinced, the world increasingly will be divided between high imagination-enabling countries, which encourage and enable the imagination and extras of their people, and low imagination-enabling countries, which suppress or simply fail to develop their people’s creative capacities and abilities to spark new ideas, start up new industries and nurture their own “extra.”

Or in other words, train our ‘demographic dividend – the young and the restless’ to be more creative, innovative and entrepreneurial! What better place than universities, but the question is "HOW” can we build capacities to help young people to innovate and become entrepreneurial at universities"! ?

How To Help Young People to Become INNOVATIVE ENTREPRENEURS?

With my almost four decades of work experience and two decades of entrepreneurship, I have found three intertwined stages that lead to entrepreneurship.

1. Explore: A young mind is naturally inquisitive. Once it is allowed to explore, it finds new ways to do things and discover new things.
2. Engage : Young minds have a short span of attention and easily get distracted. They need to be engaged in meaningful activities to pursue the new ways & things they have discovered.
3. Empower: Knowledge is a powerful tool to convert these new ways and things into meaningful, more sustainable, more useful, products and services worthy for the society at large.

“Exploring” is natural as" Young minds are restless "

As the young mind explores, it seeks knowledge, it questions the status quo. It wants to do old things in new ways. It seeks to do new things in newer ways. It innovates. It shapes the future! The question is how to make our educational institution “exploratory”, “engaging” and “empowering” for students. It just needs the mindset change for academia as one can easily connect the dots to create a clear path from ‘exploration’ to ‘engagement’ to ‘empowerment’. It is for teachers of innovators to allow their students the space to explore, to make their own discoveries and mistakes—and even to fail.? Young minds are wandering all the time in different directions aimlessly as it is always exploring. By monitoring their exploratory habits, academia can try and provide a direction based on their aptitude and attitude. Professors can encourage students to “explore” with ‘learning by doing’ methodology, by becoming ‘mentors’ to effect this methodology. They need to mentor and monitor students to help minds think in a direction that matches their aptitude. Every new exploration can be a project that can be discussed and analysed with or without referring to the text books. This would help students ‘explore’ various aspects of a particular subject to understand it better. This could lead to “critical thinking” as a habit to start with, and become a ‘skill’ overtime as muscle memory takes over.

?“Engage” them by “Not a sage on the stage but guide on the side”

A? young mind can feel frustrated if it can’t find direction since exploration is indicating there is something worthwhile somewhere to be discovered. A move in some direction may give them a sense of achievement and fulfillment. Teachers can play a critical role by providing more knowledge and resources to convert this exploration in a project with some possible outcome by giving up a measure of their authority and control in order to transition from being the “sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side,” as said by Alison King a professor at? College of Education at California State University. ‘Teachers as mentors’ can “engage” students in creating, building and pursuing the “exploration” in a project form. Thus to purposefully “engaging” students in activities that would help them find a direction with a project that could help them get a sense of achievement. This sense of achievement will boost confidence of ‘doing things’ and would put their restless mind to work. Higher engagement can be achieved by grouping the students to develop collaboration skills and encourage an interdisciplinary understanding of problems through learning by doing, rather than listening to lectures. A collaborative work space inside a university for making, learning, exploring and sharing that uses high tech to no tech tools is a must for engaging young minds. Activity clubs created, run and managed by students under the mentorship of a teacher as mentor is prevalent in the? US and produce some very engaging? thought provoking discussions. It helps the “Explorer” mindset of discovering & creating something out of nothing as well as? exploring their own interests that’s at the core of such space.?

“Empowering” them thru ”Power of Choice”

Students can be actively engaged without really thinking for themselves or making decisions on a deeper level. “Engaging”? students in creation is one of the most powerful strategies that teachers can employ in your classroom. In fact, “engaging” students to become active creators rather than passive consumers is empowering them to become innovators. To be truly innovative, students need to be ‘creative’ which comes with ‘power of Choice’. “Empowerment”? is giving students ‘power of Choice’ that means students own their learning. They are forced to think independently and must make critical choices along the way. Instead of following a recipe, they carve their own path they have discovered through “exploration” and “engagement”. Students empowered with ‘power of choice’ are fully invested, intrinsically motivated, and control their own outcomes. When students are “empowered”, they learn at a much higher level and acquire much new skills needed for innovating. Above all, it “empowers” how to lead the change rather than be overwhelmed by it; and how to innovate a productive, responsible, fun-filled career option. Who can overlook the sterling success of the likes of Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Dell, Napster and Snapchats’ of the world - founded at various university campuses - tell their own story, don’t they?

Entrepreneurship can be “learned by doing”

Entrepreneurship needs an innovative curriculum that infuses a rigorous engineering education with business and entrepreneurship as well as the arts, humanities and social sciences. Equally critical is for Teachers/ professors to become ‘Mentors’ aspiring to redefine education as a profession of innovation encompassing the consideration of human and societal needs and the creative design of engineering systems.? Mentors could easily do this once they engage with students at individual levels and by encouraging “learning by doing” . When students are “engaged & empowered”, they begin to take ownership in their ‘doing’ and become active participants in the process creation which ultimately leads to innovation and entrepreneurship. To achieve better outcomes, the teachers as mentors have to themselves ‘learn by doing’ the process or as I call it ‘science of entrepreneurship’. Such learning can be acquired by collaborating with someone who knows ‘how to do it’ instead of ‘what to do’ as the former is practice? and later is theory.?

All in all, the demographic dividend built over the last 50 years can now be leveraged to build innovation and entrepreneurship at universities by helping our young minds to explore, engage and empower students to become innovative entrepreneurs.

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