From extra-curricular to economic core: The evolution of entrepreneurship education

For several decades, entrepreneurship in India was a notion that was considered an extracurricular activity, something that was done after completing formal education. However, this perception has been slowly disintegrating. The last four decades have seen entrepreneurship education become more mainstream in the Indian economic and industrial landscape, driven by policy, technology, and changing student interests.

This development can be seen in institutions that have experienced this transition first-hand. When the Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India (EDII) was founded in 1983, the emphasis was primarily on the training aspect – module development, short-term courses, and training aspiring entrepreneurs. The initial phase was all about creating awareness – about the possibility of entrepreneurship beyond employment.

As these programs became accepted, some State governments teamed up with EDII to set up similar facilities across the country, and many of these still receive academic and professional support from the institute. This was because there was an increasing realisation that entrepreneurship needed systematic capacity-building and not piecemeal efforts.

The turning point

The turning point came in the late 1990s. A one-year diploma programme in entrepreneurship signalled the transition from training to education. Demand and results led to the scaling up of the programme into a two-year postgraduate diploma. This was in line with the overall shift in the ecosystem – entrepreneurship education was no longer about motivation but about feasibility, execution, and sustainability.

Pedagogy and demographic shift

Unlike conventional academic disciplines, entrepreneurship resists standardised pedagogy. It cannot be absorbed through lectures or tested through written examinations alone. Decision-making under uncertainty, opportunity recognition and risk assessment sit at its core. Teaching, therefore, has had to move beyond classrooms. Case studies, field visits, simulations, role plays and sustained engagement with working entrepreneurs have replaced static syllabus. Evaluation, too, has shifted — from grades to actions.

The student profiles show the extent to which this shift has trickled down. The first set of groups comprised largely of applicants from family businesses, mostly from Gujarat and the surrounding States. Today, the students hail from services, agriculture, and professional sectors, and encompass the whole country, including the Northeast. The educational streams have also widened to include science and engineering students, apart from those from commerce and management streams. It is also encouraging to see that women candidates comprise close to a quarter of each group, marking a gradual broadening of participation in enterprise creation.

This confidence has been further strengthened by developments that are taking place outside the classroom. The availability of information and technology, as well as government initiatives, has smoothened the entry process. Schemes such as Mudra, Startup India, Stand-Up India, and credit guarantee schemes have worked towards alleviating concerns that existed in terms of funding and awareness. This has ensured that students are better equipped to translate their ideas into actionable business plans.

What is being created today is a paradigm in which entrepreneurship education is no longer an ancillary skill but a formalised and structured education system—one that has developed alongside, and is now fully integrated with, the external entrepreneurial ecosystem of the country. Institutions of higher education are no longer operating in a vacuum but are instead integral nodes of a larger network of policy, finance, technology, and market access. Students receive not only degrees but also ventures that have been developed through continuous testing, feedback, and validation.

Beyond a trendy credential

However, the development of entrepreneurship education has also uncovered some uncomfortable blind spots. Too often, the story has devolved into a templated, success-fixated narrative that celebrates the creation of ventures while ignoring the vastly more typical experiences of failure, stagnation, and exit. In too many institutions, entrepreneurship education remains a trendy credential rather than a hard economic discipline, leaving graduates who can pitch well but not necessarily operate in a regulatory environment, under cash flow pressure, or in a market that is indifferent to their presence.

The under integration of faculty and industry, the lack of long-term mentorship, and the over replication of the metro startup experience dilute the impact, especially in non-metro and regional settings. A serious course correction will require a rejection of one-size-fits-all curricula, the incorporation of failure and shutdown as valid forms of learning, and a pivot from teaching the launch of startups to the development of durable, adaptable entrepreneurs who can sustain or responsibly exit ventures in the real world.

In a country that is struggling with issues of employment generation, innovation, and inequality, this is a deeply significant development. Entrepreneurship education is no longer simply about encouraging risk-taking in abstraction; it is about equipping people to actually engage with the economy. The classroom has thus become one of the most important industrial spaces in India today.

(Sunil Shukla, Director General, Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India (EDII), Ahmedabad.)

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Published – February 19, 2026 05:48 pm IST