Stanford's Entrepreneurship Course 'Ignite' in India

Image: Vikas Khot

Stanford university’s Graduate School of Business has brought its nine-week part-time course ‘Ignite’ outside the US for the first time, to the Infosys campus in Bangalore. The programme is designed for young entrepreneurs with no formal business education. It also teaches ‘intrapreneurship’, which looks at innovation within large organisations.

Programme director Yossi Feinberg says the course gives high-potential people the business tools to evaluate project risk and scale up. “We’re not here to create MBAs,” he says. The course has 41 participants and costs Rs 5.5 lakhs. The average age of participants is 35 and 20 percent of them are women. There are over a dozen professors, half of whom lecture from Stanford using advanced video conferencing technology.

The course has had over 1,000 participants in Stanford and spawned successful entrepreneurs outside the US, like German brothers Fabian and Ferry Heilemann—founders of DailyDeal (the European ‘Groupon’) which was bought by Google for $114 million in 2011.

Correction: This article has been updated. Fees of the Ignite course is approx Rs 5.5 lakhs and not 55,000 as stated earlier.