Why entrepreneurship education must move beyond the classroom — and how LBSIM, Delhi, is building that pathway - The Tribune

Why entrepreneurship education must move beyond the classroom — and how LBSIM, Delhi, is building that pathway

VMPL

New Delhi [India], October 7: Entrepreneurship education has long been built around business plans, start-up pitch competitions, founder talks, and case studies. These formats matter, but they carry a quiet paradox: a student can learn a great deal about entrepreneurship without ever experiencing what it actually takes to build something. The real test begins only when an idea meets reality — is there a problem worth solving, will anyone pay for the solution, can it be delivered with the resources at hand, and what happens when the first assumption turns out to be wrong? No lecture or slide deck can fully answer these questions. They have to be tested through action.

This is the premise behind a more practice-oriented approach to entrepreneurship education now taking shape at Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management (LBSIM), Delhi — one of Delhi NCR's top-ranked, AACSB-accredited business schools. Entrepreneurship, in this view, is not simply about starting a company; it is a way of thinking and acting — recognising opportunities, questioning assumptions, working through uncertainty, experimenting with alternatives, and creating value. These are capabilities every manager needs, not only future founders. The goal at LBSIM is not to push every student toward founding a start-up, but to ensure every student experiences the entrepreneurial process at least once.

That journey begins with entrepreneurial thinking — students are trained to look at problems differently and shape propositions around them — but it does not end there. It moves into entrepreneurial practice: testing an idea through a prototype, a minimum viable product, a market experiment, or direct customer conversations. The shift matters more than it sounds. An idea that looks convincing in a classroom can reveal something entirely different once it meets the market. A student may learn the problem isn't painful enough for anyone to pay to solve. Another may discover the proposed solution costs too much. A third may stumble onto a completely different customer segment. None of this is a failure of entrepreneurship education — it is exactly what the education should produce. The emphasis throughout is experimentation before escalation.

LBSIM's Start-up Launchpad extends this philosophy into a structured pathway: promising student ventures can receive mentoring, incubation support, and access to seed funding, subject to evaluation, while founders continue their management education in parallel. It reframes what a business school can be — not only a place that transmits entrepreneurial knowledge, but one where entrepreneurial ideas actually get tested.

A newly formed partnership between LBSIM's Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship Centre (LBS IIEC) and IIM Calcutta Innovation Park adds real depth to this ecosystem, opening access to incubation expertise, mentor networks, and funding opportunities beyond the campus. The intent is a continuum, not a set of disconnected activities: the Entrepreneurship Cell builds early energy and participation, classroom learning supplies the conceptual grounding, hackathons and market experiments let students test ideas, the Start-up Launchpad carries promising ventures forward, and the incubation ecosystem provides the mentoring and resources needed to grow. In effect: Think. Practice. Build. Incubate.

This also broadens what counts as entrepreneurship. Not every opportunity needs to be a venture-backed technology start-up — innovation shows up just as often in traditional businesses, services, social enterprises, local markets, and underserved communities. What matters is the ability to spot a problem, understand its context, build a proposition, and create value from it.

For management education, this shift matters because the world today's students are entering runs on rapid technological change, shifting business models, and persistent uncertainty. Organisations need people who can work with ambiguity rather than simply execute established processes — who can spot opportunities, test possibilities, and learn quickly. Entrepreneurship education, seen this way, stops being preparation only for founders and becomes preparation for any environment where the ability to create, adapt, and experiment is itself the competitive edge.

There is a pedagogical case for this too. Students learn fastest when the consequences of their decisions are real. A customer who declines to buy teaches something a classroom discussion cannot replicate. A prototype that fails produces a different kind of learning than a case study about someone else's product failure. Even a small first sale can teach more about value creation than a lecture on revenue models ever could. None of this displaces classroom theory — if anything, theory becomes more useful once students have a live context to apply it to. The classroom supplies the concepts; practice supplies the test.

The measure of success, ultimately, shouldn't be the number of start-ups launched alone. It should also be the number of students who learn to see problems differently, take initiative, test their assumptions, and create value — whether they go on to build companies, or become intrapreneurs, consultants, managers, or leaders inside established organisations. The destinations may differ; the capability travels with them either way.

Entrepreneurship education should not stop at the business plan. It should start with a question, test it against reality, learn from what happens, and build what proves worth building. That is the journey from Think to Practice to Build at LBSIM — and it's how entrepreneurship moves from something students study to something they actually experience.

About LBSIM

Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management (LBSIM), New Delhi, is a private business school founded in 1995 and accredited by AACSB International — one of only 30 AACSB-accredited business schools in India, placing it among the top 6% of business schools worldwide. LBSIM is ranked among Delhi NCR's top private B-schools and offers four two-year, full-time PGDM specializations — General Management, Financial Management, Research & Business Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence & Data Science — along with a doctoral Fellow Programme in Management (FPM). For the batch of 2024-26, the highest placement offer was ₹24 LPA, with the top 10% of the batch averaging ₹16.13 LPA across 85 recruiters; LBSIM's 2025-26 summer internship cohort achieved 100% placement. The Institute has a network of over 6,700 alumni. More information is available at www.lbsim.ac.in .

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