Universities need to produce more engineer-entrepreneurs

The number of our university graduates remaining unemployed and under-employed is rising every year, as the supply of graduates is outstripping available jobs.  We desperately need to promote innovation and entrepreneurship among our university graduates to turn a good number of them into job creators rather than job seekers.  Over the past years, efforts on innovation and startup in this country led to notable success in establishing a number of startup companies including a unicorn.  The Bangladesh High-Tech Park Authority recently started the University Innovation Hub Program (UIHP)in a few selected universities as a part of the Digital Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystem Development project. All these efforts are targeted mainly at IT-enabled sectors.  However, it is time that we expanded our efforts and promoted innovation in hardcore technology with deep roots in science and engineering.

Experts define innovation as a process where an invention or an idea is exploited to generate value in the marketplace or create social good. Such profitable exploitation of an invention happens through entrepreneurship.  Therefore, only scientific or engineering knowledge cannot make our graduates innovators.  They need to be trained also in entrepreneurship.  The Board of Accreditation for Engineering and Technology (BAETE), Bangladesh - a full signatory of the Washington Accord - recognizes this crucial national need.  BAETE recently included entrepreneurship related education and training as one of the program outcomes (PO) of undergraduate engineering programs - PO12:“Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the competences necessary to transform opportunities and ideas into a new business”. Engineering degree programs seeking BAETE accreditation must now include entrepreneurship in their curriculum.  But just the inclusion of entrepreneurship in the curriculum will not instill entrepreneurship zeal in students.  It needs a lot more and our universities must now look at it with earnest seriousness.

Entrepreneurship cannot be effectively taught in a regular academic course.  Universities have to provide integrated entrepreneurship education through experiential learning, problem-based learning, project-based learning etc.  They have to establish interdisciplinary collaboration by promoting joint courses and projects to bring together students and faculty from diverse disciplines like engineering, business etc. Universities need to create an interwoven ecosystem, infrastructure and facilities for promoting innovation and entrepreneurship by establishing innovation hubs, incubators, accelerators, co-working spaces, maker spaces, student entrepreneurship clubs, etc.  They have to offer mentorship programs, arrange provision for seed funds, and establish units dealing with intellectual property and tech transfer. Universities should connect themselves to the national and hopefully international innovation ecosystems, venture capital (VC), and angel investors. Capacity building of faculty members and staff will be a key priority for the universities.  They need to provide incentives to students and faculty members for engaging in innovation.  A culture is to be created where students, faculty and alumni are passionate about innovation and failure is considered not as a setback but as a stepping stone for success.  Industry-academia collaboration must constitute a cornerstone of the innovation efforts in order to expose our students to real-life problems.

To train engineering students in entrepreneurship, universities where business and engineering faculties exist side by side, a deep synergy should be created between them.  Technical universities e.g., BUET and the like which do not have business faculty at present should seriously consider setting up a business faculty/center.  Synergistic relationships between engineering and business faculties have been proven to be very successful in promoting entrepreneurship in the top universities of the world. 

Even if a graduate does not wish to open his/her own startup, entrepreneurship training nonetheless will make them better engineers by equipping them with skills such as leadership, problem solving, creativity, management, and recognition of business aspects of tech solutions. Needless to say, universities must also impart high quality education in foundational sciences and engineering principles and expose our students to the most recent cutting-edge technological developments, as these are the bedrock for deep-tech innovation.  

Innovation cannot flourish in a nation which does not value it.  At this juncture, we should ask ourselves if we want to be an innovation nation.  If yes, we have to re-model our psyche and create a culture where creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, and risk-taking are encouraged, supported and highly valued.  We should also recognise that innovation can happen anywhere at any level, and our national innovation ecosystem must be able to connect the dots for their successful exploitation.  Take the very recent example of the battery-powered rickshaw, which indigenous mechanics and artisans came up with. This has a significant symbolic meaning as it creates an opportunity to get rid of one of the last signs of slavery.  However, some sections of our society would dismiss it right away, characterising it as a nuisance, instead of praising the inventors.   The inventors were blamed for creating chaos on the street and for causing accidents.  It is true that innovation can have some unintended negative fallouts which need to be managed.   But instead of finding ways to eliminate these drawbacks, some wanted to shut down the initiative.  Thank goodness, ultimately good senses prevailed, and the authority is now in the process of phasing out human-paddled rickshaws which do not look fit for this era of artificial intelligence (AI).  Hopefully, further innovation in its design, efficiency and safety will continue.

While we somehow failed to see the potential of the above innovation, two Harvard University graduates detected an entrepreneurial opportunity here and started a battery swap company to make the effort operationally and economically successful. This is not the first time we have ignored and indeed opposed the innovative potential of our very own people.  We blamed our indigenous mechanics and crafts menfor bringing chaos to our rivers, when they started to mechanize country boats with shallow pump engines.  These are just a couple of examples of “innovation of the people, by the people, for the people”.  These and many others may not be very spectacular high-tech innovations, but they indeed have significant value.  

Let us take another case - the Dholaikhal phenomenon, where innovative minds (without or very little formal education) develop and produce components and machines that replace imports, supporting most of the industrial sectors of the country.  But they face difficulties in going up the value chain due to the lack of many things, including formal education and R&D capabilities.  At the other end, we have innovation-hungry students in our engineering programs.   They regularly demonstrate their invention prowess by bringing accolades from international competitions in advanced technology like robotics, programming etc.  Some initiated start ups on robotics recently.  However, the graduates lack the knowledge and familiarity with the issues that the Dholaikhal talents are facing.  Our national ecosystem must find ways to connect these islands: universities and Dholaikhal (metaphorically speaking), for the sake of unlocking their immense potential.

To conclude, universities in this country should be the powerhouse of innovation and entrepreneurship.  Let us train our engineering graduates to turn them into entrepreneurs, who in turn will make us a nation of innovators.  BUET and other technical universities should seriously consider establishing a business faculty or centre to create intense synergy, which is necessary to successfully train engineering students in entrepreneurship.  Adequate efforts in creating an innovation ecosystem and capacity building should be at the top of the agenda of university management, now that entrepreneurship is adopted as a program outcome by BAETE.  Universities must make sure that an incoming student feels innovation everywhere in the environment right from day one.  Given proper support to our universities to pursue innovation, they can contribute enormously to accelerating our economic growth.

ASMA Haseeb is a professor and head of the Department of Nanomaterials and Ceramic Engineering, BUET