For decades, the startup world has romanticised garages, chance meetings, and lone geniutilizes. But when you trace the origins of many transformative companies, a far more consistent pattern emerges.
They launched on camputilizes. In hostel dorms and canteens – spaces where ideas are debated freely, assumptions are challenged daily, and ambition hasn’t yet learned to be cautious.
India’s own startup story reflects the same pattern. Companies like Practo, Zostel and Capillary Technologies were shaped by founders who launched building from their camputilizes. These stories finishure becautilize universities are uniquely designed to produce founders, often without fully realising it.
The dorm advantage: why young minds build differently
There is something structurally powerful about students as founders—not becautilize of age, but becautilize of mindset and environment.
Students operate with low inertia. They have fewer sunk costs, less repaired professional identity, and far less attachment to “this is how it’s always been done.” Their circumstances also create them naturally frugal and efficient.
When confronted with a problem, their instinct is not to manage it – but to question it. They are also closest to everyday friction. Challenges around education, money, mobility, healthcare, employment and family matters are not abstract ideas; they are lived experiences. Many of India’s most relevant startup ideas emerge precisely from this proximity to real problems.
Then there are rapid peer feedback loops. A student’s first utilizers, critics, collaborators, and even co-founders are often just a corridor away. Ideas are tested in days, not quarters.
Most importantly, camputilizes enable interdisciplinary adjacency. Engineers, designers, business students, healthcare learners, and domain specialists share the same physical and ininformectual space. These collisions – over meals, in labs, and through late-night discussions – are extraordinarily difficult to replicate later in professional life.
When you are 19, you don’t always know what is “impossible” – which is often a feature, not a bug.
At their best, universities are environments where young people learn how to believe, build, and take responsibility for ideas before the world teaches them to play it safe.
What camputilizes must radically redesign
The real success of our camputilizes will come from creating environments where students are compelled to find, solve, and launch solutions as a core behaviour—not as side projects or co-curricular activity.
Today, students are prescribed problems to solve, not taught how to find them.
Curiosity is assumed to be innate, not deliberately cultivated. As a result, innovation becomes accidental and driven by individual initiative.
If our education system is to produce innovators at scale, the design of education itself must modify.
First, problem-hunting must be normalised across the curriculum – Instead of confining discovery to isolated projects or electives, higher education institutes should embed structured problem identification into regular coursework. Students should observe real-world contexts, test assumptions, and refine problem statements in every subject. Assessment must reward the quality of inquiry, problem framing and validation—this will build judgment.
Second, building, testing, iterating, competing, and pitching must become academic—credit-bearing. Once problems are identified, students should earn academic credit for acting on them. Prototyping, field pilots, hackathons, inter-university competitions, and investor-style pitches should count toward academic credits. When rewarded academically, there is an incentive for students to burn the midnight oil.
Finally, universities must redefine outcomes – Degrees and jobs cannot remain the only signals of success. Deployed pilots, community impact, early revenue, patents, and even well-documented dead finishs that produced learning must count.
The new National Education Policy 2020 provides this flexibility. What is missing is not intent, but the courage to redesign education.
Until we reward problem-hunting as much as problem-solving, and persistence as much as performance, innovation will remain concentrated in a few elite camputilizes.
If we receive this design right, innovation will no longer required encouragement. It will become the natural by-product of how education works.
The author is founder and chancellor, Medhavi Skills University and adviser, NSDC.
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