Enterprise education for development

5-Mar-2010

Enterprise education involves developing core skills required to succeed in the corporate world, such as strategic thinking and the ability to think out of the box, thereby creating a more entrepreneurial and employable pool of individuals.

With the British Council actively campaigning for the establishment of enterprise education in Sri Lanka, Manager Education Partnerships at the British Council, Sri Lanka, Eranda Ginige spoke on the importance of a culture tailored to enrich and boost the entrepreneurial skills of the future generation.

"It is common knowledge that there is a very high degree of graduate unemployability in Sri Lanka and many other countries across the world. The UK mainly resolved this issue through the development of entrepreneurial universities a few years back, where various parties aided universities to become more entrepreneurial - this involved changing existing education systems to nurture more enterprising individuals. The British Council introduced this idea to the Ministry of Education and the University Grants Commission with the aim of developing this concept in Sri Lanka," he noted.

With the British Council's work on developing enterprise education in the last two years now posing the challenge of how to sustain this development, the organisation will hold an event on 5 March (today) at the Galadari Hotel titled 'Looking Forward'.

"The National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship (NCGE) in the UK takes a lead role in developing enterprise education in universities. Unfortunately, Sri Lanka does not have a model in place to sustain this type of development. What we will look at during this particular program is how to sustain this development with the help of the corporate sector, where we expect a mixed audience of entrepreneurs, medium to large scale industries, IT companies and educators," said Ginige.

He went on to say that the enterprise summit would feature prominent speakers Ian Robertson, CEO of NCGE, who will talk on developing enterprise education as a corporate growth strategy; Chandra Embuldeniya, Vice Chancellor of the Uva Wellassa University, a well-known industrialist and business veteran turned academic, who will speak on how Sri Lanka can create an innovative future through industry and university links; and Dr. Simon Brown, Chairperson, enterprise Educators UK, and Director of the Southampton Business School, who will speak on how to incubate ideas to actual start-ups.

There will also be presentations by SLASSCOM, the strategic partner of the event and Mobitel, the premiere partner of the summit.

Enterprise education has increasingly been looked at by experts as a win-win situation that enables dramatic improvements in the quality of future employees and an organization's 'knowledge pool'. As such, corporates are gradually being approached to play a key role in sustaining enterprise education.

Said Ginige: "Universities are a pool for some of the most comprehensive research carried out in this country. This sometimes leads to the discovery of viable commercial products. Working with students to carry out their research and development will in turn give corporates valuable commercial products, knowledge and value. Supporting entrepreneurial ventures will also help contribute to the development of the economy and separate industries."