Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), a deemed-to-be university, is encouraging entrepreneurship both among its students as well as faculty.
In a recent chat with BL on Campus, H Vinod Bhat, Vice-Chancellor of the institute said the university has created a policy for faculty enterprise.
“We encourage and foster entrepreneurial ideas that come from faculty. Typically, employers tend to downplay their own employees being engaged in anything else other than work. But we encourage it and say ‘please innovate and incubate with us’. We’ve fostered a faculty entrepreneurship policy,” he said.
Faculty entrepreneurship policy mentions how much time a faculty can earmark for their enterprise, and how the university can help the faculty in this regard.
The student part
Entrepreneurship is being taught to students of engineering, pharmacy and management streams. The subject can be chosen as an elective or as a core subject for some of the engineering programmes. Pharmacy students can choose it as an elective, while there is a compulsory course on entrepreneurship for management students, the Vice-Chancellor added.
MAHE has a DST-funded (Department of Science and Technology) start-up incubator, and around 30 companies have gone through the incubator in the last five years. At least three of them have gone for second level funding, Bhat added.
The Karnataka government has given the institute a grant for a bio-incubator. For this, MAHE is focusing on pharma, biotechnology and biomedical engineering.
“I want to put 10-15 companies under the bio-incubator in the next couple of years. The chances of failure in this field are fewer than those of technology incubators,” he said.
Bhat also said that three faculty-led companies will be incubated. “I feel we are in the right situation now to make it big. Ten years from now, Manipal would have started so many companies that will not just change the district’s landscape, but also, hopefully, go far and wide,” he said.