To realise this potential, business schools will need to change the way they think at many levels. Firstly, admission procedures need to value initiative and risk taking. A student who has taken a break to backpack across India or attempt a failed start-up may appear less focussed than his peers. However, he/she has demonstrated courage and initiative, and admission processes need to be able to understand his/her motivation before a passing summary one-sided judgement.

Secondly, potential entrepreneurs in every batch need to be nurtured differently. From creating a track of entrepreneurial courses to supplement the basic grounding in business disciplines, to creating different entrepreneurial internships, this often requires a substantively different set of elective courses and projects. It may also require adding a significant cohort of experienced entrepreneurs to the visiting faculty list.

Third, we need to create both a deferred placement option (potential entrepreneurs with an idea will get a support salary for a fixed period of time, incubation support and the option to still take campus placement after a gap), and an alumni incubation process. Many MBAs have taken significant education loans, and aspire to work for a few years prior to pursuing entrepreneurship. By this time, they have acquired both meaningful experience and some initial capital. The progressive business school must recognise this, and gear itself to encourage alumni ventures.

What needs to change is the implicit incentives in business schools. This is not just about making entrepreneurship ‘cool’, but about creating a larger, more honest awareness of both the perils and rewards of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is difficult, and involves much lower social acceptance in the initial phases. If we do not paint an honest and complete picture, the wrong person may be attracted to entrepreneurship for perceived ‘glamour’ and the dream of becoming the next Flipkart, and this can have disastrous consequences.

We cannot take conservative security seekers and turn them into entrepreneurs. Business schools need to build the ability to look for entrepreneurial instincts (initiative, courage, unconventional thinking are all early indicators) and then build a curriculum, incentives and an enabling environment to nurture that entrepreneurial instinct.

A significant proportion of business school students will continue to become leaders of large corporations. This is desirable. Corporations need strong leaders, and developing these leaders will continue to be one of the primary roles of the business school. Business schools also need to enable the creation and growth of tomorrow’s large corporations (which is today’s start-up) and, even if one in five business school graduates is selected for entrepreneurial instinct and nurtured for entrepreneurship in a systematic way, this can be made possible. When that happens, the words ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘MBA’ will cease to feel like an oxymoron when used in conjunction!