Entrepreneurs play an important role in the economic development of a country. Successful entrepreneurs innovate, bring new products and concepts to the market, improve market efficiency, build wealth, create jobs, and enhance economic growth. Entrepreneurs convert ideas into economic opportunities through innovations which are considered to be major source of competitiveness in an increasingly globalizing world economy.

Therefore, most governments in the world strive to augment supply of competent and globally competitive entrepreneurs in their respective countries. While developed nations have a reasonably good pace of entrepreneurial supply, most developing countries suffer from dearth of such entrepreneurs.

This is one of the reasons for the poverty in developing countries, despite their rich resource endowment. More efforts need to be made to encourage startups in India.

While supporting young firms in technology and other new-age innovative sectors is important, India also needs to develop an ecosystem that encourages innovation at more mature enterprises across the industrial spectrum, across the existing manufacturing, export, and rural and social enterprise sector. This segment has the capacity to generate a large number of jobs.

According to the World Bank’s World Development Report 2013, around 600 million new jobs will be required in the next 15 years to support a growing workforce.

It is important to note that in most emerging economies, 9 out of 10 jobs are created by the private sector, which is the foundation of any thriving economy. In the coming years, developing countries must rebalance their economies towards greater domestic consumption, import demand and higher value business activity and hence, entrepreneurship is vital to the future of developing countries, thereby ICT Academy focuses on Entrepreneurship Development as one of its key pillars.