Source by President University Website
Cikarang, Indonesia—On the previous edition we have discussed on the amount of graduates who built start-up business, which is mostly used as one of the indicators whether a higher education institution deserve to be called Entrepreneurial University. Is it the right indicator for a higher education institutions to call itself Entrepreneurial University?
According to Adhi Setyo Santoso, Director of SetSail BizAccel, a business incubator under President University (PresUniv) who is also lecturer of Business Administration Study Programme PresUniv, “Many higher education institutions use Entrepreneurial University to create adaptive human resources toward changes. However, not many higher education institutions measure how entrepreneurial they are in their daily activity.”
To measure and realize higher education institution as Entrepreneurial University can be done using GITA approach. What is GITA? GITA is an abbreviation of Growing Indonesia: a Triangular Approach, an approach supported by Erasmus, a commission in the European Union that supports activities in education, training, youth and sports in various countries. The word triangular here refers to three points of view, which are the close cooperation between universities and corporations, have a curriculum on entrepreneurship, and employability of graduates.
Thus, a higher education institution is not worth mentioning itself if it does not have a close cooperation with the corporation, and does not have an entrepreneurship curriculum in its lectures. However, why employability is one of indicators? Please keep in mind the definition of entrepreneurship here is vast. This definition also includes the entrepreneurial spirit of those who work as employees. This is commonly referred to as intrapreneurship. Corporations will be developed when supported by entrepreneur-minded human resources.
These three aspects, according to the concept of GITA, must be joined in a physical space called Growth Hub. This hub is a place where students, lecturers and alumni from various universities gather in the GITA program, startups and business leaders of the company can meet each other. They can exchange ideas or other business ideas there. This is where innovative ideas will be born and developed. You know, innovation is the spirit of entrepreneurship.
This GITA-style approach is not only applied in Indonesia, but also used by a number of business college in the European Union. GITA, which is a collaboration between UoG Business School with PresUniv and several other leading campuses, is lead by prof. Neil Towers, principal researcher at the university. At GITA, Prof Towers is assisted by Gideon Capie who is also Funding Manager at UoG Business School, and Nadine Sulkowski, Lead of International Development at the university. Sulkowski said, "We identified the lack of an entrepreneurial culture, the right space and place, as well as the resources and interactions between universities in Indonesia and companies, as an important challenge in the implementation of GITA."
Through GITA, with its triangular approach, UoG Business School introduces a measuring tool to assess whether a university is an Entrepreneurial University. The measuring tool is called HEInnovate, an online self-assessment tool to assess whether an institution of higher learning has built an entrepreneurship climate in its campus environment. With HEInnovate, higher education institutions can assess this question themselves.
What is measured through HEInnovate? There are at least seven dimensions. We will discuss this issue in the next issue.
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