Entrepreneurship on Campus: The Backward Integration Model for Investors

Abstract

Backward Integration in entrepreneurship could be an approach of an investor to increase its level of control on its entrepreneurs being groomed in education institutes by identifying entrepreneurial skills in students and mentoring them. It could be a part of the Investors Strategy which is defined as “the match an organization makes between its internal resources and skills and the opportunities and risks created by its external environment6. The backward integration model helps to build a few innovative companies from student entrepreneurs with a reasonable degree of early success and promising future potential and also it exposes students in real entrepreneurship in a competitive do-it-to-learn-its environment. It is emotionally much harder to restart after a failure because the risks seem clearer. This may be why the energy and enthusiasm of youth are so important in research and in new businesses. While thinking about fear, think of “paranoia” of entrepreneurs with respect to sharing thoughts, ideas and concepts with others. It is pretty natural for them to hold on to their ideas close to their chest until they build a prototype and test it in the market. Students have to develop their own set of tools to finally building the end product. This is possible on campus with less risk and more guidance from the experts and investors. It is always admired those who insist on building small tools before even prototyping their product. It helps them to think through their product and more than anything else, it reduces dependencies. As a corollary, if you have to run for specialist help for your product’s core, you may want to think about bringing that specialist onboard6. The initiative is to explore how investors can organize the youth to create next generation young companies. The initiative is to see how investors, in their capacity, can play a role in enabling this and hopefully creating some great companies for itself and the ecosystem to cherish. The culmination of this quiet but relentless effort is to reduce the risk of failure of the new venture, instilling confidence in investors as well as in students who want to pursue entrepreneurship. The present study focused on knowing investors’ expectations in terms of running entrepreneurship program parallel to mainstream academics and involving domain experts giving all the necessary inputs to create entrepreneurial mindset. The researcher used questionnaires for investors and B-school students which included close/ open ended, multiple choices, nominal and ordinal questions. Investors’ regular interaction with Bschool and business relations was found out to be most important in overcoming the fear of starting a new venture.