KOCHI: The higher education sector in Kerala needed to create the best climate for the industry-oriented research and growth of entrepreneurship in the state, said T.P. Sreenivasan, a former diplomat and chairman of Kerala State Higher Education Council. Addressing the young entrepreneurs at the concluding day of the TiEcon 2017 at Kochi on Saturday Sreenivasan said better infrastructure, better utilisation of technology and internationalisation hold the keys for the higher education sector in the state.
Emphasising the need for internationalisation of higher education Sreenivasan said; “We are players in a global market and therefore our universities have to reach out to the world. Looking at our old requirements would only help in reinventing the wheel again and again, confining us to something which has already been established and found”, he said. He also called entrepreneurs to take the lead in establishing the new entrepreneurial trajectory for the higher education sector.
G. Vijayaraghavan, former member Kerala State Planning Board, Abraham Koshy, Professor Indian Institute of Management, Ahmadabad and several others addressed the session. A session on opportunities in rural areas for entrepreneurship took stock of the issues faced by the people in the sector. Addressing the session, Shivads B Menon, managing director, Sterling Group of Companies, said agricultural entrepreneurship suffers from lack of visibility, deficiencies in logistics, marketing and failure to establish well integrated consortium of stakeholders.
“The state needs thousands of entrepreneurs in agriculture in order to disrupt the present concepts of agricultural and introduce innovative ways of doing agriculture” he said. The second day also witnessed signing of MoU between World Trade Centre Kochi and TiE Kerala for facilitating and fostering entrepreneurship development in the state.
