Pakistan has a huge young population (72% under the age of 30 years) and, understandably, this means there is a huge number of educational institutes, of both primary and higher education. A large number of these students enter the job market immediately after their graduation, but their success rate for securing employment is only 50% given the slow economic growth in the country. We wanted to improve these statistics by providing a platform where students could equip themselves with entrepreneurial skills before graduating from university. We hoped that this would promote graduates to consider self-employment and founding their own companies, which in turn would lower the unemployment rate and boost the economy.

We began by approaching universities and pitching them our incubation model. Given that this outreach was part of a public sector initiative, we did not charge them anything. Our goal was to share our best practices and learnings so that the universities were empowered to start and run an incubator program. We wanted to create a sense of ownership and excitement around the idea.

Initially, the idea received a lukewarm response. We realized that there was a lack of understanding on both sides and notable confusion about how university research could be commercialized in an environment where the intellectual property laws were still at a nascent stage. How could students access the resources they needed to launch corporations while they’re still in university? How could universities benefit from the ability to generate more than traditional academic output (degrees, publications, research, patents) and be seen as places where students could launch their own companies or bring products to market?

As a result of these sessions, we came to realize that academic innovation programs are a different ball game and that promoting research commercialization and spin-off companies would not be as simple as we had thought. To tackle this, we initiated a capacity-building program for the academic institutions and gathered all the relevant resources. By happenstance, this was at the same time that the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan, a body that regulates higher education in the country, recognized the gap and launched their own capacity-building programs. Their program was initiated with the hope of launching BICs (Business Incubation Centers) across all public universities. With a common goal, we decided to join forces and began working to scale BICS across the entire country.

We named this program the “Network Partners Program” and dedicated two members of staff exclusively to this project. By now, the universities had come to realize that there was a need for such initiatives but the questions remained around the topic of domain knowledge. We drafted an incubation manual that enumerated the entire outlay of the physical infrastructure, the core incubation program, how the startups would be scouted and inducted, etc. We also provided them with all the documentation templates that we had developed, including a manual with a chapter on creating synergies with industrial partners for the growth of startups and the program. A copy of this manual was given to each university that came on board to launch their own incubation program.

I switched roles in early 2019 when I was offered the chance to help a private university kickstart its own incubation program from the scratch. I found myself, once again, entering an environment where startups, entrepreneurship, and innovation were a totally new thing. My immediate challenge was to create awareness and acceptance of the concept that students could become entrepreneurs. It was widely assumed in this setting that the only option the students had upon graduation was to become ‘Job Seekers’. It was my task to change this mindset and provide these students with the option of becoming “Job Creators” who felt confident enough to found innovative startup companies and solve the most pressing issues facing society. The research component also posed a challenge, as expected, because of the lack of awareness surrounding the topic of intellectual property protection. Further, the research occurring at this university was purely theoretical and not applied in nature. This was not an issue that I had to resolve directly, but it did create challenges for us in the sense that we had to discover a way to define how theoretical research could be commercialized. We had to, and are still in the process of, motivating the faculty to look for the applied research component within their projects so that the road to commercialization becomes clearer.

Academic incubators help foster strategic partnerships between students, academic institutions, and private industries. Students these days don’t just want degrees: many want their own businesses and they want them now. Academic incubators provide the community, resources, and environment that makes their dreams possible. These incubators catalyze innovation by directly connecting students to investors and organizations they might not otherwise encounter. We transposed the incubator model we used successfully in 2012 and incorporated and expanded it to cater to what the students and faculty needed to spur innovation within their context. We bridged the gap that existed between academia and government, especially concerning intellectual property protection processes and procedures. However, the rollout of incubation programs in academic settings is still a work in progress and the sector still needs nurturing to realize its full potential of innovation output.

All articles by Uzair in our Experts in the Field series:

• Setting up an innovation program in the public sector
• Incubators in an Academic Environment
• Innovation Scouting in the Incubator
• Teaching a mindset change from project to product

Other articles and series written by Uzair:

• A Deep Dive into Innovation Scouting