Entrepreneurship - Classroom 2 Boardroom

To build an effective startup and entrepreneurial ecosystem like Silicon Valley, it is important to start preparing our youth from the grassroots level. If we leave aside the few top institutes of our country, most of the institutes, colleges and universities still do not have a functioning Entrepreneur-Cell.

The gap between classroom and boardroom

The Indian higher-education system in 2018 was producing roughly 1.5 million engineering graduates a year, yet a vanishingly small percentage of them went on to build companies of their own within the first five years after graduation. The reasons were structural rather than motivational: limited exposure to real customers, no peer group of founders, and a curriculum that rewarded test-taking over problem-finding.

Redian's view, expressed at multiple campus engagements through 2018, was that the fix had to start earlier than the final year of college. Entrepreneur-Cells, when properly run, give students a sandbox to test small commercial ideas, pitch to local businesses, and fail cheaply. They normalize the idea that building a company is a learnable craft rather than an act of personal heroism.

Why this still matters in 2026

Eight years on, the picture has improved — the Startup India programme, the rise of tier-2 city incubators, and the maturation of platforms like the Atal Innovation Mission have all helped. But the underlying argument of this 2018 piece still holds: the institutes that consistently produce founders are those that treat entrepreneurship as a daily practice rather than a final-year elective.

Redian itself has stayed close to this thesis. The company continues to host campus visits, supports interns from regional engineering colleges in Uttar Pradesh and Kenya, and contributes mentors to local incubator programmes. Many of the engineers now leading delivery on CRM and ERP implementations for the firm's 200-plus enterprise customers entered as fresh graduates from exactly these underserved campuses.

For readers landing here in 2026 — whether you are a student weighing a startup attempt, a faculty member trying to launch an E-Cell, or an enterprise hiring manager — the takeaway is the same: the pipeline starts in the classroom. Redian's careers and about pages describe how the company recruits and develops engineers from this pipeline today.