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My journey towards the discovery of entrepreneurship started when one fine day my senior came to me and asked “Nishu…..suppose I give u a fresh graduate………how will you develop him/her to be an entrepreneur. I want you to design a unique and effective training program”
In my short three years of HR career , I never thought an organization would ever invest in training their employees in entrepreneurship. Moreover , this topic was completely an alien to me as it never crossed my mind. My exposure in HR only taught me how to make good managers, leaders but not an entrepreneur. So here starts my journey…………….
As usual, I went to my seat and googled “ENTERPRENURSHIP”. Immediately the computer asked “Did you mean entrepreneurship?”. Yeah!!!! Let me confess…..there was a spelling mistake. After coming across lots of web definitions and meanings, I concluded:
Entrepreneurship is not a discipline; it is a state of mind.
If a person can take initiative, risk and is innovative, then we can say that the person is entrepreneurial.
Soooohhh…..my challenge was to develop a platform to build that capacity in an individual so that he/she becomes entrepreneurial. One cannot create entrepreneurs. We can only facilitate the person to understand and actualize his/her inner potential. The idea of the whole training program was to create the spark and make an individual think differently. For this you must not promise a support system to the learner. One should only facilitate learning and let the learner find their own way.
In retail, every store head is an entrepreneur in their store. They have to think differently to increase sales, increase conversion ratio, bill value, footfall, reduce the leakage of loyal customers, compete with the local retailers etc..etc..etc..The Store Heads should have vision, problem solving skills and risk taking abilities……………………..This answered my question why my company wanted to train the employees in entrepreneurship.
An entrepreneur should have Sarpa Drishti (snakes eye view) i.e. micro vision and Garudra Drishti (Bird’s eye view) i.e. macro vision. Micro vision is necessary to have hold over every function, finding details etc. and macro vision is necessary to know direction, growth and impact.
Incidentally, this project came to me at a time when my friend, Abhishek, was aspiring to be an entrepreneur. This added interest and created more enthusiasm within me to explore and understand the topic. I did a lot of R&D to understand the ongoing training process, methodology and subject matter in entrepreneurship. While there are many institutes in India that provides diploma and Masters degree in entrepreneurship, I failed to see the expected/ desired outcome. There was a huge knowledge and skill gap. To reduce this gap was a major challenge.
I applied transdisciplinary approach to put the entire structure in place. The first step was to identify the objective. No training program can succeed, unless you are clear about the outcome. So the monalisa portrait of a perfect entrepreneur was identified. Remember that conceptual base and soft skills is the fundamental for all entrepreneurial skills. You cannot compromise on that. The next step was to identify tasks and then put what kind of knowledge, skills and attitude are required to execute those tasks. The identification of subjects, on-the job training, projects, workshop, activities, case study, design, execution etc…etc.. followed next. And thus a robust framework for making an individual entrepreneurial was designed. I can confidently say that the framework is unique and has the capability to achieve it’s objective. Unfortunately due to organizational intellectual property issue, I cannot share it with everybody.
This is not the end………….the journey towards the discovery of entrepreneurship begins here. I will keep on sharing my learning, knowledge and views on this topic.

Regards- Nishu