A comparative study of entrepreneurial imprinting across top IITs in India

Abstract

India is witnessing exponential growth in the startup space. It has around 77,000 DPIITrecognized startups from 656 districts. A closer look at the Top 100 unicorns reveals that more than so% of these unicorns are founded by alums of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT -M, IIT-B, IIT -D, IIT -K, and IIT -KGP). Thus, it is intriguing to study if there is any institution-level entrepreneurial imprinting that these institutions pass on to their alums and if there is some difference in the levels of imprinting from one and other institutions in this list. For this study, we obtained the list of startups and its founders registered on the Crunchbase database. We have analyzed the dataset from three perspectives: First, if one IIT is better at imprinting entrepreneurship into its cohort than the others. Second, if any of these I ITs imprint an inclination towards set of sectors in its cohort. And third, if any of these I ITs influence the entrepreneurs' location selection for establishing their venture. We have performed the required statistical tests to check whether the results are statistically significant. We found that for the first and second perspective, there are no differences, meaning all IITs perform the same. However, for the third perspective, we observe that alums of IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi are more likely to establish their start-ups in Bombay and Delhi, over students from other institutes. Interestingly, Bangalore remains to be a favorite across all institutions. Going ahead, it is important for us to improve our academic institutions (in terms of both curriculum and resources), as well as the ecosystems to sustain the momentum that India has gained in the last few years.