ENTREPRENEURSHIP DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM ON CAMPUS: THE BACKWARD INTEGRATION MODEL AND MITIGATION STRATEGY FOR INVESTORS

Backward Integration in entrepreneurship could be an approach of an investor to increase its level of control on its entrepreneurs being groomed in education institutes by identifying entrepreneurial skills in students and mentoring them. It could be a part of the Investors Strategy which is defined as “the match an organization makes between its internal resources and skills and the opportunities and risks created by its external environment (Prashant Hebbar, 2011). Backward integration model helps to build a few innovative companies from student entrepreneurs with reasonable degree of early success and promising future potential and also it exposes students into real entrepreneurship in a competitive do-itto-learn-it environment. It is emotionally much harder to restart after a failure because the risks seem clearer. This may be why the energy and enthusiasm of youth are so important in research and in new businesses. While thinking about fear, think of "paranoia" of entrepreneurs with respect to sharing thoughts, ideas and concepts with others. In all investors' years, they don't think they have ever seen a single idea some variation of which they have not seen before but entrepreneurs must share enough to validate their ideas with people who are not friends or family (Sridar Iyengar, 2010) so whoever is meeting the entrepreneur needs to give them comfort that there is a code of conduct that would be followed (Ramaraj, 2011). The best of the ideas in the world came from campuses and investment community's feels there is a lack of good investible companies outside so best time to take risk for people is student time on campus (Manish Kumar, 2012). 40% of investors' business in the US comes from repeat entrepreneurs but investors are very open to backing first time entrepreneurs in the Indian context because they see more first time entrepreneurs than in the West simply because the whole model of building a fast-growing enterprise and then exiting is fairly new (Alok Mittal, 2012).