Cost, quality and scale are the impossible trinity for any entrepreneur in skills. If you raise quality then you raise cost, but you need scale; if you raise scale, you have the danger of lowering quality while you lower cost. It is a linear programming optimization problem. When I went to Wharton it cost Rs 14,000 an hour, ISB is Rs. 8,000, IIM is Rs. 6,000 an hour and Rs. 3,500 an hour for IIT. We have to do this at Rs 200 an hour; you do not need more cooks, you just need a different recipe. It is a calibration that there is very little we can learn from Germany or Singapore. How do you get into 800 places and deliver the required quality at Rs 200 per hour. We have to watch the lessons and learn what the world has to offer but we have to come up with something Indian which handles volumes. Most education systems in the world have not been built for large scales; they believe that quantity is the enemy of quality; here we need to get both.
The innovation in involving companies is in figuring out the financing solution; who pays? If there is visibility to a job, the kid is willing to pay himself; if the government is willing to give a skill voucher linked to employment then it will become more viable. If the company is willing to reimburse, it becomes more viable and if the banks are willing or micro-finances are willing to fund and if it leads to a job, then it becomes even more viable. It all boils down to the fact that the business model of financing is built on whether there is a job at the end of the tunnel.
This industry is the single biggest entrepreneurial opportunity in the planet in the next 20 years. It is not only the flow of the one million students every month, but there is a stock of 400 million who need to be transitioned now with re-skilling and re-education. It is currently unclear what the exact business model for skilling and education will be but they will emerge. So you have to stay alive long enough to get lucky!