Recently I had a chance to engage with representatives from IIT Kanpur and University of Waterloo during events organised by Society for Information Display and IHFC, IIT Delhi.
In the decade and half that has passed since I graduated, an unmistakable change can be noticed in the way educational institutions view post graduation employment opportunities for their students. While campus placements remain a key focus point entrepreneurship is now increasingly being viewed as a viable , though risky,career opportunity.
This shift is, of course, a welcome change as it rightly views entrepreneurship as a path to wealth and job creation that has the potential to transform the prevailing economic realities and create new opportunities where none existed before.
The inclusion of many of these entrepreneurial programs is also because of pioneering VC and incubator firms like Ycombinator[1] and the immense success of silicon valley startups who have proven beyond any doubt that startups can be massive successes.
Almost all of the big tech firms today were small garage labs and businesses that grew over time to become leaders in the technology sector. Their rags to riches story is the one that continues to inspire thousands of students in the world to build something new.
Prof Sanjeev Bedi ,Chair in Immersive Design Engineering Activities in the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Waterloo, described some of the programs at his University that provide students with immersive hands-on learning experience and opportunities to students to even start their own companies.
Spending time with corporations to gather a list of problems and trying to solve them is a viable path for success in the business world and definitely something that is realistic and achievable. For engineering disciplines at least this is reminiscent of apprenticeship culture that was prevalent in tradesmen working with ceramics,metals ,wood or in professions like ship building and construction.
Science has advanced our understanding of how things work but engineering predates scientific understanding by millennia. Humans were building ships and crossing the high seas before they knew anything about material properties like tensile strength or Young's modulus. Humans were building wind mills without any knowledge of mechanics. If they could do it then we should be able to do it too. Right? Both of these activities are highly desirable : one in the transportation sector and other in the energy sector.
Well things are not as simple as that because economic factors play a big role too. Many students take up engineering activities because it is a gateway to a good prosperous life. That's the promise of education as it is currently structured. Why would anyone pay huge fees or compete with thousands of other students if there was no prestige associated with a university. This incentivisation keeps the machine chugging along.
Paradoxically the incentives that encourage students to take up education also confine them and explicitly condition them to look for openings and grab a small portion of the pie rather than truly thinking big. Consequently they compete not just for admissions but also for jobs and resources.
There is a huge power imbalance right here. Corporations dictate through their economic strength —or perhaps we should call it market forces— what should and should not be built. Sure innovation is possible in tiny gaps that are left. Little improvements in the production line, policy level tweaks, design improvements all of these can be innovative. But economic thinkers ,Clayton Christensen being the most prominent among them, call this sustaining innovation. Innovation that is done explicitly to maintain a hold over market. [2]
This is different from disruptive innovation that creates entirely new markets and requires a certain amount of healthy disdain and a lot of self belief.
In the research and scientific fields too there have been people who have voiced similar sentiment. The one that I can remember is Nobel Prize winning German American scientist Herbert Kroemer who famously remarked that discovery does not happen by deciding what to discover and then going after it. [3]
In fact this spirit of innovation of learning how to think for yourself and following your natural curiosity can be attributed to the great American scholar Ralph Waldo Emerson who unleashed American creativity in his now famous call to American people to no longer look to the EU for inspiration but find it within themselves. It is no coincidence that the USA has produced the greatest innovations known in modern history. [4]
Pioneers like the Wright brothers and Thomas Edison had no formal education but they shaped the modern world. Today every engineering student dreams of working with NASA but the truth is that NASA owes its entire existence to the gumption and the courage of self educated Wright brothers who took flight when no one thought it was possible.
How completely and absolutely absurd it would be to think that current college education would encourage Wright brothers to gain hands-on practical experience with corporations before they start out on their own!
When true innovation really bursts on to the scene it often looks impractical. There is no way to tell whether or not it will work. Or if it works it will succeed. Or if it succeeds, the innovator will get rewarded. This is called RISK. Risk taking is what separates entrepreneurs from businessmen and employees. There is no hedge to hide behind.
The term entrepreneurship has become a bit loaded though with nearly every one trying to bask in the glory of being called an entrepreneur or at least a change maker. I can be called guilty of that too. But it's important to remember that while sustaining innovation can build good businesses it often does not bring anything new or transformative.
But what do we say to the students who will be joining the workforce and will find themselves without any means to bring their vision to life? I would only say this. Never stop learning.
It is true that the cost of experimentation has become too high. Especially in deep tech there is little room to maneuver. The single best,most effective thing they can do is to continue to learn. Especially after formal education is completed and they have time to pursue their curiosity. It could be in STEM or arts. Learning no longer has to follow a strict path. With commitment to learn it is possible to recognise good ideas and it is possible to create opportunities where none exist and perhaps even create something new.
REFERENCES
1 Essays by Paul Graham
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/carousel/Essays%20by%20Paul%20Graham
2 Disruptive Innovation Theory
https://www.christenseninstitute.org/theory/disruptive-innovation/
3 Nobel Lecture – Herbert Kroemer [pdf]
https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/kroemer-lecture.pdf
4 Self Reliance
https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/self-reliance/
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