Tarun Khanna, Director of the South Asia Institute and Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, Harvard Business School spoke to Business Today about how Indian companies can work with colleges to nurture talent. In “An Entrepreneurial Take on Talent,” he says that companies can sponsor colleges to create apprentice programmes between colleges and companies. They can work with colleges to develop training curricula.
“One of things that we really need to do in India is nurture talent. We talk a lot about our so-called demographic dividend and I think it is widely acknowledged that it is not an automatic dividend and something that we will need to earn as a country. Unleashing the potential entrepreneurship inherent in this talent is something that can really move India to the next level. Entrepreneurship is not just the province of start-ups and new companies. There’s room for entrepreneurship in all walks of life – whether you take civil society, political life, government and even in mainstream companies. I think our mainstream companies have lost that script. For most part, I am not sure that many of the top 500 or 1,000 companies would merit the epithet ‘entrepreneurial’. There are opportunities to nurture entrepreneurship both within themselves and in the system within which they operate.”