“Give me a fish and I eat for a day. Teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime“ - is a Chinese proverb with a global entrepreneurial purpose.
  Thinking along those lines is National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN), a non-profit programme of the Wadhwani Foundation, co-founded in 2003. It’s goal is helping to launch the next generation of entrepreneurs in India. NEN has collaborated with the Stanford Technology Ventures Programme (STVP), a globally recognised leader in teaching entrepreneurship. The outcome: a first-of-its-kind comprehensive, year-long certification course – the NEN-STVP Entrepreneurship Educators Course (EEC), for faculty engaged in high growth entrepreneurship education. 
NEN’s membership currently comprises 200 top institutes across 26 cities and towns of India. In addition to IIM-B, members include IIM-Ahmedabad, IIM-Calcutta, IIT-Bombay, IIT-Kanpur, BITS Pilani, and National Law School, Bangalore, etc.
How it works
NEN works with institutes from varied disciplines, including engineering, management, arts, science and commerce, information technology and business schools. These institutes become members of the NEN network. NEN then helps them initiate and expand their own entrepreneurship programmes, and facilitates the sharing of activities, events and resources across the network.
IIM-Bangalore, one of the leading management institutes in Asia, is actively promoting entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education through its Nadathur S Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning. (NSRCEL-IIMB) is also a leading member in NEN.
EEC
A rigorous year-long foundation course in designing, developing and teaching comprehensive campus based entrepreneurship programmes. It is offered to faculty from NEN member institutes from all backgrounds/disciplines. Certification is linked to implementation and delivery of the programme.
The course covers concepts, entrepreneurship teaching methods and programme development. In fact, 80 per cent of the faculty that enrolls in the EEC has never taught high growth entrepreneurship. The course is designed and taught by leading faculty from around the world, from institutes including Stanford, London Business School, IIM-Bangalore and Columbia University.
In order to anchor EEC in Asia, NEN has signed an MOU with IIM Bangalore’s NSRCEL.  
According to Laura A Parkin, Executive Director, National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) and Wadhwani Foundation, NEN is all about idea generation, recognising opportunity, creating value and leverage of resources. Laura feels business students need local role models and local case studies to relate to, hence once these faculty members go back to their respective institutions, their students would stand to benefit by the practicability of the innovative business ideas learnt.
STVP’s Executive Director, Tina Seelig, who brings her experience in teaching entrepreneurship and innovation at Stanford, and a cultural perspective from Stanford and Silicon Valley, points out, “This is the first time STVP, with its rich experience in entrepreneurship education, has collaborated in India – tailoring a programme suited specifically for the needs of Indian faculty. The affiliation will help bring in global best practices to India, with content and an approach that maximises effectiveness in entrepreneurship education.” 
“Entrepreneurship is a relatively new area for us, and it is important to be acquainted with international best practices to be able to offer our students the highest standard of entrepreneurship education possible. The NEN-STVP workshop would expose the entrepreneurship faculty with the practical and the do-able aspects of teaching entrepreneurship suited specifically for the needs of Indian faculty,” affirms Dr Gayatri Saberwal, Chief Coordinator and NEN faculty leader at the Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology, Bangalore.
Prof Edward Rubesch, Lecturer, Thammasat Business School, Thammasat University,Thailand; has to his credit, founding four companies in Thailand, as well as starting the New Ventures programme at Mahidol University’s College of Management. He feels entrepreneurship serves as a common link between countries like India, Thailand, China, etc, who even have trading similarities.
Earlier this year, NEN conducted ‘Orientation workshops’ for faculty across all NEN member institutes, as the first in the series of workshops constituting the Educators Course.
The programme consists of 5 modules plus certification process. The ‘students’ go through five modules, wherein highly qualified faculty from all over the world, provide their expertise. 
Experiences
Also doing the course is Prof M S Rao, S P Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai. He feels there is increasing awareness and interest in entrepreneurship among the productive generation in India - but virtually no faculty to teach entrepreneurship. “Through collaborating with the Stanford Entrepreneurship Programme, NEN is equipping India’s putative entrepreneurship faculty with the academic wherewithal to design and teach a course on the subject.”
Has the entrepreneurship course helped him?
“At SPJIMR, I combine both administration and teaching functions as Chairperson for the Center for Entrepreneurship. My exposure to NEN’s faculty development programme has increased my effectiveness as a faculty for our pioneering ‘Start Your Business Programme’ for budding entrepreneurs (www.spjimr.org). We have participants from Bangalore and Chennai, attending the 16-weekend programme held at our Andheri, Mumbai campus.”
Prof Suresh Kumar K of PSG College of Technology - STEP, Coimbatore, feels the course has provided him an overall view about handling entrepreneurship cases and about the interactive teaching methodologies.