How do you create the next generation of N R Narayanmurthys, Ashok Sootas and Dhirubhai Ambanis? Is there a formal process you can create that will throw up a lot more entrepreneurs? Can business school students be taught entrepreneurship to create a breed of top order, management oriented entrepreneurs? Can students in schools as diverse as engineering, law and biotech be taught entrepreneurship?

The National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) is grappling for answers to similar questions. Today, the bulk of the courses on entrepreneurship run in the country has NEN as a partner in some way or the other. Laura Parkin, director of the National Entrepreneurship Network spoke to Prosenjit Datta on how the NEN's efforts to create an entrepreneurship culture in the country and the learnings so far…

Prosenjit: Why don't we start with the SP Jain programme on entrepreneurship…

Laura: I assume you are speaking about the SP Jain "start your business" programme. As you know, S P Jain is a founding partner in the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) and they run a full range of entrepreneurship programmes for their students. The "Start Your Business" programme is one of their offerings for professionals. They run very innovative programmes for their students as well.

Before we discuss these programmes in detail, let me give you the background which will put things in context. As you know, the National Entrepreneurship Network is an initiative of the Wadhwani Foundation, created by Romesh Wadhwani, chairman of the Symphony Technology Group. Romesh is a successful serial entrepreneur, originally from Bombay and now residing in Silicon Valley. He set up the Wadhwani Foundation in 2000, after merging Aspect Development with i2 Technologies in the largest merger in software history.

The overarching mission of the Wadhwani Foundation is to help generate economic opportunities for people. Within that, the foundation focuses on two areas. One focus is to provide opportunities for jobs and livelihoods for the disabled population - one of the most marginalized groups in India. The other focus is accelerating and supporting high growth entrepreneurship.

When the Wadhwani Foundation was starting out, we did a lot of research to see how we should devote our time and money to achieve the most impact. We discovered that young people were not being formally introduced to entrepreneurship - this in stark contrast to the US, where, over the past two decades, entrepreneurship has become institutionalized in higher education.