ENTREPRENEURESHIP SCENARIO AFTER THE PHARMACY EDUCATION_Essay by Ankit Joshi

Entrepreneurship as a scholarly field was defined as seeking to understand how opportunities to bring into existence future goods and services are discovered, created, and exploited, by whom, and with what consequences. In the context of pharmacy, entrepreneurship is generally associated with the establishment of community pharmacy and business management.

However, entrepreneurship and its associated skills are key to the development of a range of health services in community and hospital sectors. In the modern economic climate, entrepreneurship, or possessing entrepreneurial spirit, is critical for driving innovation and creating a prosperous society. 

Entrepreneurs are usually viewed as individuals who take substantial risks to go out and start new companies, but most pharmacists go to work for entities that are already established, such as a community pharmacy or hospital. Such positions are generally considered safe, as they promise a steady paycheck and continued employment. For that reason, entrepreneurship is not commonly listed among a pharmacist’s skill sets. But now days the scenario little changed and Pharma graduates become more focused on entrepreneurship.

The Pharmacy colleges in the country are providers of knowledge and training in pharmaceutical operations to the students but the colleges should create a mechanism by which the fullest potential and zeal of the students is exploited. Entrepreneurship promotes to do something new, develops the ability to take risks and helps in creating a new system of things. There is tremendous change in the economic scenario of the country. Students should look forward towards creating their own enterprise. Hence entrepreneurship promotes a vision for the future and it is the need of the hour. This article deals with the scope and developmental avenues of entrepreneurship in pharmacy academics in the country.

A large number of pharmacy colleges have come up across the country offering sufficient number of seats in D. Pharm and B. Pharm. for increasing aspirations of the students and parents. This success in growth was due to the combined and collective efforts of AICTE, state governments, private entrepreneurs and many others. 

Due to availability of pharma manpower, it will be beneficial and appropriate if young pharmacy graduates seek out to exploit their full potential by starting their own ventures and thus becoming job generators rather than job seekers. Moreover the salaries being paid to pharmacy graduates are also not attractive and are not on par with other vocations. Hence this necessitates the pharmacy colleges in the country to take necessary steps to promote entrepreneurial learning programmes in the pharmacy curriculum so that the pharmacy graduate coming out from the colleges can become self reliant and inspire students towards self employment in their early career. Hence the pharmacy colleges should keep their attention on developing a syllabus which not only produces trained manpower for pharmaceutical industry but also produces self reliant entrepreneurial pharmacy graduates which accelerates the process of economic development and growth of the country.

A pharma technocrat through pharma entrepreneurship can bring a radical change that can meet the challenges of emerging changes due to liberalization and globalization. Fast changing pharma industrial scenario, growing obsolescence in pharmacy curriculum stresses the need for pharma entrepreneurship among the graduates. Pharmacy graduates have a strong bent of mind in science and are capable of maximizing their skills if given the right training. Entrepreneurship development among the pharmacy graduates will be an effective mechanism of renaissance in technology innovations and industrial development of a nation.

The process of entrepreneurial development involves providing all the inputs and information to a person for enterprise building and sharpening his entrepreneurial skills. The necessary things to be taught are technical, financial, marketing and managerial skills, Entrepreneurial attitude and ability. The entrepreneurship development (ED) is an organized tool for industrial development and a panacea for unemployment. The objective of ED is to motivate a person for entrepreneurial career and to make him capable of perceiving and exploiting successfully the opportunities for enterprise. 

The small scale industry development organization established in India in 1964 looks and aims at entrepreneurship skill development, technology upgradation and other issues related to small industries through a chain of small industries service institutes located at different places of the country.

Every pharmacy college should launch an entrepreneurship development cell with a view to encourage students to consider self employment as a career option, provide training in entrepreneurship through modular courses and to teach the relevance of management. This cell will introduce the concept of entrepreneurship in curricula of pharmacy. It also facilitates self employment and entrepreneurship development through formal and non-formal programmes.

A faculty development programme can be conducted by the cell to develop professionals in entrepreneurship development so that they can act as resource persons in guiding and motivating the students to take up entrepreneurship as their career.

This faculty development programme will provide a platform from which programmes, formal and informal can be conducted to support skill development activities particularly catering to specific areas of requirement, to identify and provide solutions for the problems of small business management and entrepreneurs, to provide training and retraining of entrepreneurs through variety of programmes and to train trainers, counselors and motivators involved in the development of pharmaceutical entrepreneurship.

There is an increasing need for entrepreneurial skills in health care to encourage the creation of new and innovative health-related services, technologies, and therapies. Skills including peer assessment, peer development, communication, critical evaluation, creative thinking, problem solving, and numeracy were developed. Overall, it served as an effective teaching tool for the promotion of entrepreneurship in the pharmacy degree and could be easily adapted to other university programs.

I believe that pharmacists should view themselves as entrepreneurs throughout their career development. After getting professional course one can use all information and aim toward entrepreneur to create opportunities.