Maker Culture’ and ‘Make in Universities Programs’ for creating a cultural change in Engineering Graduates; to be job creators rather than job seekers.
Our nation is faced with an exciting challenge – it needs to create over 1M new jobs every month for the next 20 years to give employment to the 200M youth who will join the work force.
These jobs will have to come from new companies; and therein lays the paramount significance of creating a fundamental shift in our higher education system where the most brilliant minds are trained to be job creators (of new knowledge, employment and wealth) in the society, than be job seekers.
A strong case study – Kerala has been a front-runner in social indices and literacy; but the lack of timely changes in higher education and their inability to be in tune with the industry job requirements, has created a situation where the state has around 25lac unemployed but highly literate youth. The contrast is stark as the state has around 25Lac migrant laborers for blue collared jobs.
As every challenge presents in itself an opportunity, Kerala which had almost no startups and little to show for entrepreneurship culture, took the first step into student entrepreneurship by announcing the Student Entrepreneurship Policy in 2012.
This landmark policy gave engineering students 20% attendance and 4% grace marks every semester. Today, there are more than 200 student startups In Kerala and the promising early signs of a growing startup ecosystem.
The visionary Vice Chancellors of Gujarat Technical University and Kerala Technical University have now come together and are at the forefront of creating the University Student Startup Policies to support these changes across affiliated colleges. With over 1 million students joining the engineering stream every year across India, the education system needs a serious overhaul.
Changes in Curriculum for the Startup Era
The engineering syllabus needs to undergo major changes, in order to be in tune with the national objectives of the ‘Make in India Program.’
Every first year student has to compulsorily take the Practical Workshop classes as a part of the degree certificate. Thus, students in 2016 still learn carpentry, smithy, fitting, plumbing, sheet metal and lathe. We have to move from this system designed for the 1980’s to the Digital Manufacturing Era of 3-D printing, Milling Machines, Laser Cutters, 3-D Modeling and CNC Machines. This change is needed to create world-class hardware and software product designers who can then build and create the next Apple and Google from India.
Professor Neil Gershenfield, the Head of the Center of Bits and Atoms at MIT, Boston teaches a course called “How to make almost anything”. This course is also available online and by upgrading our workshops to Digital Fabrication Labs (Fablabs), we can encourage our engineering students to “make things” rather than learn theory lessons. Around 400 such Fablabs are present around the world, while India today has nine.
Converting Final Year Projects to Startups – A real taste of industry
All Engineering students have to also submit a final year project as part of the degree certificate. Currently, this is a non-imaginative and near repetition of what was done by the previous senior batch.
Instead of a theoretical final year project, creating a startup project allows students to create real products that can be used by customers. Leading Universities such as Stanford allow such programs where undergraduate students can do projects on Facebook or Google, getting a taste of the best in-class technologies that are being used by the industry.
Creating a startup while in college also means that students work together in groups. In the real world, everyone works in teams but we have an education system that is tuned for individual excellence. Student teams can now build prototypes of products every six months and by the time they graduate, they would have worked on 3-4 product ideas.
Along with the Software Product Industry Think-Tank iSPIRT, a program is being planned where young students across Universities in India can be allowed to work with cutting edge startups.
Introducing Online Education from world class Universities.
The lack of adequate faculty has been a key problem in introducing ‘Make in Universities’ till now. With massively open and online courses (MOOC’s), students can now learn cutting edge courses in machine learning and big data from many leading universities around the world.
Almost 95% of startups fail commercially. However, with over 9B USD (58,000Crores) in investments in 2015 alone, the students who are building technically successful products gain real world skills in using next generation technologies and become highly in-demand graduates for startup jobs.
The stage is set for the Prime Minister to convert these early experiments into National Frameworks. By scaling up the blueprint of University Startup Policy at Gujarat and Kerala across the nation as a ‘Make in Universities Program’, it would contribute significantly in creating a great pipeline of skilled talent and innovative ideas, which would help transform India from a ‘developing’ economy to a ‘developed’ economy in the knowledge era.
Guest Post by Sanjay Vijayakumar – Founder of Startup Village, India’s first PPP Model Technology Incubator. He is a part of iSPIRT’s Product Circle. He is also a Member of Board of Governors of APJ Abdul Kalam Kerala Technological University.