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Why Everyone In The Startup Space Should Take Up An Entrepreneurship Course Even the finest talents may need some polish to shine through and entrepreneurship is proving to be one of those skills

By Rustam Singh

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

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"We don't claim to teach you entrepreneurship. However, we will teach you many different things about entrepreneurship, making it easier and helping you avoid 20 mistakes that you might have made before," says media stalwart, RonnieScrewvala.

No one is going to teach you, or give you a step-by-step guide, on how to become an entrepreneur. But what can be taught is how you can set up a business.

A young girl who wanted to learn ballet was almost bundled off to a Kathak class due to the lack of a tutor. Mridula, the mother of 12-year-old Omisha then thought of bringing expert tutors of co-curricular activities on a single platform for the users. Four years later, today, she is living her dream, with her entrepreneurial venture, Inmovidu, launching on June 1. What made her take the entrepreneurial plunge? Among the many factors was the 15-week entrepreneurship online bootcamp – StartUp with UpGrad.

Mridula says, "Like many entrepreneurs, I was not sure if online programmes would really help. So when I discussed this with a friend and looked up the course more intensely, I decided to give it a try. And, I am glad I did." Watch her talk more about her experience by clicking here.

A mother and entrepreneur Shubha Chandrasekaran says how her life changed when she saw a banner of UpGrad on the internet and it was exactly what she needed to kick-start something of her own, while being able to give adequate time to her family. "These modules make you think and they make you change your plans along the way because you get new ideas," she says.

Have you ever reached a conclusion in the constant battle between artists and now entrepreneurs, whether talent and business acquisition is an art that is gifted or can be acquired over time?

No matter which side you choose to lean on, there is no doubt that even the finest talents and the most unique of all gifts can be polished more to make it shine, something which only a well researched professional can partake the skills required to teach inspiring entrepreneurs to exceed. Entrepreneurship in particular is one field where mere talent, finding the perfect product or service and executing in a timely fashion may not result in the kind of results you're looking for. One simple look at Kickstarter will verify you the same – sometimes as silly as a man trying to make a sandwich will get ridiculous amounts of donations, but a brilliant idea of sending private messages in outer space may die out.

Clearly, there's something wrong with our approach. Merely following inspiration quotes from social media to quit our mainstream jobs and start pursuing an independent entrepreneurship venture is a definite recipe for failure. Here's where entrepreneurship courses and schools programs come in play – they take your mind from a vague idea that may be the most powerful idea there is, but give it structure. By guiding you through the best options, based on tried and testing formulas and understanding where and why previous ventures failed, and possibly a glimpse into the future of what might exactly work for you.

There are no easy shortcuts. Everyone who learns to make things, anything at all has to learn the fine art of selling that idea to the public. The execution, marketing, promotions, pricing, target audiences and several other environmental variables actually matter equally, if not more to the product or services at play. While no class can possibly teach you an idea, and the final decision will always be rested on the entrepreneur itself, learning entrepreneurship formally will definitely help you understand:

  • Validating your Idea
  • Identifying the right business and monetization model
  • How to build your first MVP
  • How to create a new brand in a market
  • How to possibly raise funds
  • Organize financial capital and structure
  • Predicting and managing growth
  • Valuation of companies

Essentially a bootcamp, it will polish your talents through and connect dreams to the harsh reality of market trends and audiences. They will guide you through what would otherwise take possibly years to understand of consecutive failure, if not more. Take entrepreneurship classes like a senior mentor, that's inspiring and guiding you through all possible problems you could face, andeven giving you wisdom to perform better.

If you're fresh off college, or worked in the corporate or small scale sector and are trying to start entrepreneurship for the very first time, you'd quickly understand how difficult it is to make products sell. You may invent the greatest device there is, pending months designing and understating it, invested more than you had, and quickly realized the worst – nobody is interested to buy it, even if you think they need it. Selling things is real hard work. But there's a silver lining in this – everyone starts this way. Barely a small fraction of entrepreneurs are successful literally overnight, the rest that make it owe their success to years of mentorship, trial and error and practiced research. By having a safe cocoon for your ideas to execute, your creativity can have a greenhouse to safely nurture better than the real world directly, thus saving you a lot of motivation, time, energy and money to use for better places later.

You should look for entrepreneurship-programmes if –

You already have the idea in your mind

Students, or fresh graduates, drop-outs, or even students during a relatively longer break from coursework should try to enroll in a formal entrepreneurship program. It's a good idea to test waters by dipping a toe at a time and sharing the idea or learning form the experiences of others would help expand growth. Remember, you're not paying the program to pay for your idea, that's the job of investors or capitalists. You're paying them to learn how to get money from the investors and everything else. It will be a sponge for your creativity to learn and expand ideas.

You're going through a low creative drive

Whether you're going through a freshly tried startup, or going through a phase where your creativity isn't just matching your desired goals, then entrepreneurship school is the right place for you to be. It will give you insights and help you understand no matter what phase your start-up is already in, you're not alone! There were so many that were in the same spot as you are in right now. Learn how they broke out and changed their situation, and learn where those that failed didn't make it through so that you don't repeat their same mistakes.

You want to assist family business

There are several entrepreneurs lucky to have initial hiccups all sorted before they gain a position of power in a family business. However, in that pool of familiarity and comfort, family businesses are often stagnant in growth, even if revenues are high. Older technologies tried and tested methods of operations and marketing can be updated by the younger generation. This is where you'll be surprised the offers that business schools introduce to you, offering you potential for growth even in places you didn't think imaginable before.

Entrepreneurship has largely been about learning on the job, and while that may not change, there are a whole lot of skills and learning one can gain from industry experts with UpGrad.

Started in July 2015 by Mayank Kumar and Ronnie Screwvala, UpGrad works along three broad components – learning specific aspects of different entrepreneurial concepts, experiencing these concepts by listening to industry experts talk about their challenges, and application of these concepts for real-life business needs.

With a well-defined agenda built on the "do and learn' principle, the four-month-long bootcamp helps strengthen and sharpen entrepreneurial skills essential at every stage of growth – idea validation, scaling up, funding – and gears them to meet volatile market demands.The online and offline networking opportunities open up multiple avenues – interesting ideas to work on or interesting people to work with.

It is great to know that now there's finally a platform that that helps you grow by building a community and events.

Think it of this way – if you think your idea and approach is good to proceed without a formal entrepreneurshipschool that means you're aiming for profits large enough that you can afford to spend a bit on the tuition fees or enrolment classes of the course. If you're not that certain for growth, then you definitely need to enroll ASAP! Click here to find out more.

Rustam Singh

Sub-Editor- Entrepreneur.com

Tech reporter.

Contact me if you have a truly unique technology related startup looking for a review and coverage, especially a crowd-funded project looking to launch and coverage.

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