How is enterprise education different from entrepreneurship education?
With the start-up boom, there is significant discussion about the necessary education and skills for an enterprise. But there is also confusion over the terms entrepreneurship education and enterprise education. The two are often conflated and used interchangeably.
Difference
Entrepreneurship education focuses on imparting the knowledge and skills to encourage self-employment and/or founding an enterprise/ start-up/ SME. A relatively recent entrant in the country’s UG and PG programmes, it brings together diverse disciplines such as Business Environment and Ecosystem, Accounting and Finance, Sales and Marketing, People Management and Leadership, Strategy, and Venture Capital. These classroom courses often complement maker labs and an enabling ecosystem where students can incubate their entrepreneurial ideas and create viable market-ready products/solutions/services.
Enterprise education, on the other hand, is about developing the mindset/ attitudes, competencies, skills and behaviours required to help a person thrive in an existing corporate setup or set up own business. These include critical analytical thinking, design thinking, problem-solving, impactful communication, business and market awareness, adaptability and resilience, leading effective teams, and inclusive and agile leadership. These constitute a wide range of emotional, intellectual, social, cultural and practical behaviours and attributes that enable one to thrive in the evolving corporate landscape.
The challenges of the 21st century are complex, and multidimensional and can only be addressed by fully recognising their social, economic, and environmental impact. This means organisations will employ teams composed of people versed in various disciplines, requiring members to have a holistic view of problem-solving, be cognisant of the approaches of other team members, and be ever-ready to adapt to shifting market realities.
Meeting challenges
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report identifies cross-functional skills such as critical thinking and analysis, active learning, emotional intelligence, resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility which are in increasing demand across multiple emerging professions. Unsurprisingly, a professional’s employability will be increasingly measured by how well-equipped he/she is with these enterprise skills and how quickly they can contribute to organisation’s growth.
At the same time, one must recognise that these skills, along with entrepreneurship education and associated skills enumerated above, distinguish a successful entrepreneur from the rest as they wrestle in an innovation-driven, highly-competitive and dynamically-changing marketplace. It is important to recognise that applying these enterprise competencies does not exclusively lead to venture creation. However, they allow the entrepreneur to challenge the status-quo, be proactive in building a business network and be agile enough to fail faster to succeed sooner.
This is also the need of the hour for, India requires to create 90 million new non-farm jobs by 2030 and inculcate relevant skills for the burgeoning working-age population to reap the demographic dividend the 1.41 billion population bestows on it. Moreover, India’s competitive advantage in the knowledge-intensive global economy is increasingly dependent on its ability to innovate and engage in new economic activity. Thus, entrepreneurship education has assumed increased importance with the objective of creating more entrepreneurial individuals who will be self-employed and/or act as independent entrepreneurs creating jobs for others in the future. Moreover, entrepreneurship education prepares individuals for a world where they will increasingly manage their careers and lives in a self-directed manner, often adding significant social, cultural and economic value to society.
Both entrepreneurship and enterprise education help develop an entrepreneurial spirit, inculcate self-awareness, a high degree of curiosity towards new possibilities, motivation to go beyond perceived limitations and the capability to seize opportunities. This spirit enables the individual to tolerate uncertainty, ambiguity, risk and failure.
