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Entrepreneurship and the Liberal Arts: The Making of Ashoka University
Sud, Mukesh; Narayan, Priyank; Agarwal, Medha Case IIMA-CIIE0015 / Published August 13, 2019 / 27 pages. Collection: Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
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In 2006, four successful entrepreneurs decided to establish a world-class mega university. Initially, the project progressed slowly until Vineet Gupta was able to locate a small plot of land in Sonipat, Haryana. Forty-eight hours before the payment deadline, Ashish Dhawan and Sanjeev Bikchandani agreed to invest in their personal capital to kick start the project. They however suggested a pivot in favour of a smaller private liberal arts college. Meanwhile, Pramath Sinha, with prior experience in establishing the Indian School of Business launched a pilot through the Young India Fellowship (YIF). Dhawan and Bikchandani, through their extensive entrepreneurial networks, raised scholarships for the first two batches of the fellowship in the hope of attracting other donors to the board and getting a buy-in for Ashoka University. The team faced a number of challenges: managing the new model of collective philanthropy, recruiting faculty and finding jobs for the first undergraduate batch. At Ashoka University’s first graduation ceremony in 2017 they wondered whether this model could revolutionise the higher education space like the IITs and IIMs had done for the country.



Learning Objectives

Some concepts that the instructor might wish to introduce to the students are: Entrepreneurial mindset: Having identified an opportunity in the Indian education space, how an entrepreneurial approach (leveraging networks, building a team, maintaining purpose and vision) can, despite lack of prior domain experience, enable a successful outcome; Lean start-up: How principles such as minimum viable product, hypothesis testing and the lean-build-measure loop have been successfully applied in the education space to establish a world-class institution; also, how entrepreneurs test their vision through validated learning; Philanthropy: How a model of collective philanthropy (embodying one-donor-one-vote) can succeed in building institutions that may be beyond a single individual's capability or reach; also, the need to attract funding by creating a local context while maintaining the larger vision.


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  • Overview

    In 2006, four successful entrepreneurs decided to establish a world-class mega university. Initially, the project progressed slowly until Vineet Gupta was able to locate a small plot of land in Sonipat, Haryana. Forty-eight hours before the payment deadline, Ashish Dhawan and Sanjeev Bikchandani agreed to invest in their personal capital to kick start the project. They however suggested a pivot in favour of a smaller private liberal arts college. Meanwhile, Pramath Sinha, with prior experience in establishing the Indian School of Business launched a pilot through the Young India Fellowship (YIF). Dhawan and Bikchandani, through their extensive entrepreneurial networks, raised scholarships for the first two batches of the fellowship in the hope of attracting other donors to the board and getting a buy-in for Ashoka University. The team faced a number of challenges: managing the new model of collective philanthropy, recruiting faculty and finding jobs for the first undergraduate batch. At Ashoka University’s first graduation ceremony in 2017 they wondered whether this model could revolutionise the higher education space like the IITs and IIMs had done for the country.

  • Learning Objectives

    Learning Objectives

    Some concepts that the instructor might wish to introduce to the students are: Entrepreneurial mindset: Having identified an opportunity in the Indian education space, how an entrepreneurial approach (leveraging networks, building a team, maintaining purpose and vision) can, despite lack of prior domain experience, enable a successful outcome; Lean start-up: How principles such as minimum viable product, hypothesis testing and the lean-build-measure loop have been successfully applied in the education space to establish a world-class institution; also, how entrepreneurs test their vision through validated learning; Philanthropy: How a model of collective philanthropy (embodying one-donor-one-vote) can succeed in building institutions that may be beyond a single individual's capability or reach; also, the need to attract funding by creating a local context while maintaining the larger vision.