Bangladesh needs champion universities to nurture entrepreneurs within academia: Experts

Bangladesh needs universities that can nurture entrepreneurs within academia like MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley to attract the attention of the industries, the experts from academia and industry said in a webinar on Wednesday.

As an apex body of universities, the University Grant Commission (UGC) also needs to develop ideas on how to foster universities in this regard, the speakers said at the event titled "Industry-Academia Collaboration for Entrepreneurship Development: What's Appropriate for Bangladesh?"

"The industries will never come to the universities until they see the benefits. Industry must see and get the confidence that if they go to the universities, they will see the real fruit that need for their sectors," Khondaker Abdullah Al Mamun, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering of United International University said at the event jointly organized by the DataSense and The Business Standard (TBS).  

"So in that case, top global universities like MIT, Harvard are creating a capacity, confidence and availability of their resources. They have the ability to alleviate the pain of the industries, "he added.

"That means we have to show the proven result. Then, industry will come forward," he said adding that "We had enough discussion in the last 5 years. Now we need to create some leaders who can drive the journey."

He mentioned that they have some successful models of Industry academia collaboration. 

Emphasising the need for an updated academic curriculum, Dr Wasel Bin Shadat Post-Doctoral Fellow, Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), said, "It needs to be evaluated if the business faculty students are being provided with real-life knowledge and teach them about risk capacity. Hence, students should be given internship opportunities in different industries as part of their job preparation during academic years."

He highlighted creating a platform between academia and industry for broader collaboration where UGC can take the lead.

However, he mentioned that the university has to play a proactive role in engaging with the industry.

He mentioned that "Supervise students in projects, corporate training, support and finance projects, and resource sharing and liaison" can be the industry's role.

Every year around 2 million youths join the job market.

Unemployment increased to 2.59 million in the first quarter (January-March) of 2023, up from 2.32 million in the last quarter of 2022, according to the quarterly data from the Labour Force Survey released by the BBS recently.

In this regard, the stakeholders said that encouraging entrepreneurship can be crucial to decrease the unemployment rate.

Sajid Amit, Director of the Center for Enterprise and Society and Director of the EMBA Program, at ULAB, said that the issue should be mainstreaming and the primary role of government should be funding the universities.  

The speakers also said that the ecosystem within universities needs to be with R&D labs, engaging teachers to the people who are coming from the industry (to teach) to connect both industry and academia.

They focused on the recognition of the lack of understanding of the industries that they can see and the university to understand what they can offer to create value for the university.

For example, many universities abroad mobilize financial resources more for entrepreneurship than the regular academic programs, they opined.  

Md. Altaf Hossain, Project Director of iDEA, mentioned the different initiatives of the government to facilitate startups and entrepreneurs.

Among others, Mohammad Abdul Momen, Director, IBA, Dhaka University sent a video message and Prof Mahmood Sayed spoke at the webinar.  

Dr. Ananya Raihan, Chief Imaginator DataSense at iSocial was the Moderator while Inam Ahmed, Editor of The Business Standard, delivered the welcome remarks.