Experts throw light on entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is a vital subject for beginning businesses especially startups which are evolving in every state of our country, Speaking about entrepreneurship and its speciality, Dr Ramakrishna Velamuri, Dean of Mahindra University's School of Management and Neil Tarallo, Senior lecturer of entrepreneurship at the SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University explained in an interview with The Hans India.

There are many things that go into effective Entrepreneurship and one of the things Neil Tarallo learnt is that entrepreneurship needs to be effective in teaching and requires us to think about specifically about two components, like skills and tools that one needs as an entrepreneur to succeed in that particular field.

Students were taught about the behaviours, by helping them by increasing opportunities to interact with different entrepreneurs coming from around the world. The university setups programmes like entrepreneur residence where entrepreneurs comes to the campus for two days and meet students, for them to ask anything related to entrepreneurship and to make them understand how a person behaves in different points of a startup.

The university also organises a business plan competition, which teaches students the process by which the university evaluates the environment the students are doing in a startup.

In the university, soft skills and hard skills were also focused on, where Cornell University has been terrific about hard skills and over the last 20-30 years, emphasis was particularly done in the business world for soft skills.

Cornell University has diverse population and the best aspect is that entrepreneurship is not centralized only to the campus. There are probably 25 different schools where everyone have, some component of entrepreneurship that students manage themselves. "So if I am a student in the school of management, and I want to begin a technology business, I can go to the Engineering school and take courses specific to starting a technology company. We have those kinds of opportunities," said Neil Tarallo.

Many companies have been created like software companies, product companies, food-based companies by the students of Cornell University, wherein there are many examples to look into the achievements they have made in this competitive world. For example, one of the students at Cornell, had an idea of make a company that made hummus, which is chemical free, in order to give it a longer life. "The student started making the hummus in 5 gallon buckets in his apartment in a mixer and the packaging was also done in order to distribute it to various grocery stores. Now he has huge distribution centres, delivering this product," said Neil Tarallo.

There are many accomplishments made by the students of Cornell University who achieved in making a device which rotates the screen horizontally or vertically. This was created by the students of Cornell's College of Engineering. Similarly undergraduate students of the university invented a device that detected diseases which bees were dying of. The device scans the bodies of bees, detects the disease and distributes a spray that will kill the disease for saving the bees.

Business is different in various countries and keeps changing according to the scenarios. "The interesting thing about entrepreneurship is that when one really starts it, it almost takes on a life of its own," said Neil Tarallo. Entrepreneurship has been in a stage where everybody needs it to achieve something in their lives.

He added, "But what countries make the mistake is creating the policy but not being transparent about the policy." Entrepreneurship is a powerful thing, which can change the lives of people. Countries often make this mistake of creating the policy, but not being transparent about it means to be an entrepreneur.

According to Neil Tarallo, in various places, the government takes away the success of the startup after it reaches a successful stage. "In Italy one can do business only one at a time. They are not allowed to start multiple businesses. The government taxes heavily in Italy. Public policy and transparency in policy are very important for entrepreneurship," said Neil.

As per him, setting role models for people is very important so that startups can move with a smooth pace. "In many countries women are actually the activators of entrepreneurship and not men. Indians are bit more challenging, I have students who are entrepreneurs from India and we have had long conversations about what are the challenges faced in this field," said Neil.

In order to setup a startup at the base level, solving problems of people is very important. It can be applied in any context, like technology, products or service. "If you have skills in working with cloth where is the problem that people are facing, is what an entrepreneur should look into. How one can solve using her skills to improve other people's lives, to create value for them and how can you use your talents and improve other people's lives is very important," said Neil.

For example, in Guatemala Neil Tarallo found a few entrepreneurs who were working within a village, where women came together to raise the village up. "Women there were adept at weaving. So they were weaving things and products, more than mats and hats, clothing in open market could be sold. Money could be made for that and they started doing that, which got them global recognition of what they are doing and they could start their export business. So now they are exporting their products and they are including all the people in the village, in learning how to weave," said Neil.

According to Neil Tarallo, in India today the government has been giving policies for people to start businesses that will fundamentally change the country. "I think India is becoming more entrepreneurial. Dr Ramakrishna and I were speaking about the great relation between US and India. In India we have a large population of people who are very good at technology and in US it is very expensive to engage people who are educated at that level. If there is a problem to be solved, we can confidently say that Indians can solve that problem in a cost-effective way very easily and this inspires innovation and entrepreneurship in India," said Neil Tarallo.