Program Manager - Entrepreneurship Practicum

POSITION & DESIGNATION

The Program Manager Entrepreneurship is a senior execution role within Kumaraguru Institutions reporting to the CPO, Forge. Academy. The role carries end-to-end responsibility for the design, delivery, and outcome realisation of entrepreneurship practicum programmes across undergraduate, postgraduate, and early-stage startup cohorts.

The Program Manager operates with high autonomy and accountability, owning complex, multi-stakeholder programmes and ensuring consistent delivery of measurable entrepreneurship and talent outcomes. The role is designated as Assistant Professor in the MBA-IEV programme at Kumaraguru Institutions and will require active engagement across academic institutions, industry partners, startups, and the broader ecosystem.

ROLE PURPOSE

The Program Manager Entrepreneurship is responsible for designing & delivering high-quality, repeatable programmes that reliably move participants from problem discovery to validated venture outcomes.

The role exists to ensure that entrepreneurship education delivered is not theoretical or event-driven, but execution-led, evidence-based, and outcome accountable whether the cohort is undergraduate students, MBA participants, or early-stage founders.

KEY RESULT AREAS (KRAS)

1. Curriculum Design & Pedagogy Excellence

• Ensure entrepreneurship is taught as a rigorous, execution-led discipline not as an extracurricular or elective activity.
• Design a modular, stage-gated experiential curriculum that moves students from ideation to MVP and pilot readiness.
• Develop and curate proprietary playbooks, case studies, templates, and digital toolkits tailored to student, campus, and cohort contexts.
• Train and collaborate with academic faculty to embed entrepreneurial thinking and venture logic into core engineering, science, and management courses.
• Continuously iterate the curriculum based on cohort performance data, mentor feedback, and real-world venture outcomes.

2. Venture Pipeline & Incubation Management

• Own the end-to-end student venture pipeline from awareness programmes and ideation workshops to active incubation cohorts.
• Track conversion metrics across the full funnel: awareness application selection MVP pilot profitable business.
• Enable prototype development through access to maker spaces, labs, mentors, and small-scale seed or prototyping support.
• Establish and maintain a startup health dashboard tracking customer discovery, validation cycles, pivots, and early traction across all active cohorts.
• Support high-potential teams in accessing incubators, accelerators, and broader ecosystem opportunities.

3. Stakeholder & Mentor Network Architecture

• Build and manage a structured mentor-on-call network, ensuring adequate mentor-to-startup ratios for high-potential student and founder teams.
• Establish partnerships with corporates, investors, incubators, and accelerators to enable demo days, pilots, and real-world venture exposure.
• Engage successful alumni entrepreneurs as Founders-in-Residence, mentors, or reviewers to provide relatable, credible role models within the programme.
• Serve as the primary relationship manager for industry and institutional partners across all programme engagements.

4. Ecosystem Culture & Community Building

• Drive a campus-wide entrepreneurial mindset through high-impact interventions: hackathons, bootcamps, venture reviews, and failure-learning forums.
• Mentor and enable student-led entrepreneurship bodies to act as peer-level execution engines within their institutions.
• Contribute to thought leadership by positioning the campus and programme as a regional entrepreneurship hub through events, publications, and inter-institutional initiatives.
• Build a visible, active community of founders, alumni, mentors, and practitioners around the programme.

5. Impact Assessment & Operational Sustainability

• Implement longitudinal tracking of student founders and alumni ventures to measure long-term impact: startups formed, jobs created, revenue generated.
• Provide quarterly, data-driven impact reports to leadership that combine quantitative metrics with qualitative venture narratives.
• Document and systematise all programme delivery processes to enable replication across new cohorts, institutions, and geographies.

PERFORMANCE & SUCCESS METRICS (1218 MONTHS)

• Successful delivery of multiple entrepreneurship practicum cohorts across at least two institutions, with consistent quality and outcomes.
• Demonstrable venture validation, pilots, and continuation across cohorts measured against agreed KPIs at the start of each cycle.
• Strong credibility and trust established with academic institutions, faculty, students, and ecosystem partners.
• A documented, scalable Entrepreneurship Practicum playbook aligned to global standards and ready for institutional replication.
• Active mentor and partner network of at least 30 practitioners engaged across cohorts within the first year.

QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE

Essential

• Bachelors degree in any discipline; MBA, MTech, or equivalent postgraduate qualification preferred.
• 37 years of experience spanning entrepreneurship education, programme management, startup ecosystem roles, or a combination thereof.
• Demonstrated ability to design and deliver multi-stakeholder programmes with complex logistics, timelines, and measurable outcomes.
• Strong written and verbal communication in English and Tamil; comfortable presenting to students, faculty, and senior leadership.
• Experience directly working with, mentoring, or advising student entrepreneurs, early-stage founders, or young innovators.
• Comfort with ambiguity, rapid iteration, and the pace of a growing applied education environment.

Desirable

• Prior experience founding, co-founding, or working in a meaningful capacity at an early-stage venture.
• Familiarity with design thinking, lean startup methodology, jobs-to-be-done, and business model innovation frameworks.
• Existing relationships within the Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, or broader South India startup and investor ecosystem.
• Experience managing cross-institutional programmes or cohorts across multiple campuses or geographies.
• Exposure to national or global entrepreneurship competitions.