The Take-Up project is working in collaboration with LUMS and the National Incubation Center Lahore (NICL), to bolster the entrepreneurial mindset within the context of Pakistan. They have already taken a step towards instilling the entrepreneurial mindset in their students by piloting a new ‘Entrepreneurship 101’ course in collaboration with the University of Saarland. The course served as an introduction to entrepreneurship for students that had an interest in the field but didn’t know where or how to start. Through four weeks of asynchronous training mixed with in-person feedback sessions from LUMS faculty, the participants were given a glance into the startup world. The objective was to learn how to lay the foundations for a startup and how to think like an entrepreneur. The pilot run was a success, and two of the participants who continued to work on their new ideas after the course was complete even applied to incubate their ideas at NICL roughly 6 months later.
The teams from LUMS and NICL have been working on their strategic initiatives to further embed the entrepreneurial mindset in Pakistan. They attended international workshops in Greece and Germany to exchange knowledge and ideas with foreign professionals. The travel proved extremely beneficial for all parties involved as everyone got an insight into the kind of entrepreneurship that exists in different parts of the world and found methods of improvement to implement within their own systems.
In order to have a genuine impact on the state of entrepreneurship in Pakistan, the LUMS and NICL teams are also developing a training guideline for instructors and teachers, as part of a train-the-trainers initiative. By doing so, the reach of these trainings will go far beyond the scope of LUMS and NICL and will be an important step towards building an entrepreneurial mindset within the population of Pakistan. Over time, we intend to keep working on new initiatives and finding new ways to bring about innovation and encourage entrepreneurship within Pakistan, so we can boldly face the future ahead of us.