By Kamalpreet Sandhu and Karupppasamy Subburaj
For decades, value engineering has helped the industry ask a disciplined question on how we can deliver the required function with minimum waste and maximum usefulness? It has improved products, processes, and systems by forcing engineers to look beyond habit and examine what really creates value. Punjab’s higher education classrooms now need a similar discipline, not only in what students build but also in how they think, decide, and act when problems are unclear. This discipline is important because the next education challenge is not only about access or enrollment, but also about considering entrepreneurial thinking as a ‘value-engineering tool’ to reimagine education. It requires a different cognitive orientation towards knowledge itself. More capacity is now required to identify real problems, allocate scarce resources effectively, and iterate solutions under constraint.
At its best, entrepreneurial thinking is the ability to recognize unmet needs, work creatively with available resources, take intelligent risks, learn from feedback, and convert ideas into economic, social, or environmental value. In that sense, entrepreneurial thinking is value engineering applied to the way we think. Classical value engineering optimizes what we build. Entrepreneurial thinking improves how we think before we build. Both begin with constraints, asking what function is truly needed. The only difference is the level at which the discipline operates. One improves products and processes, while the other improves judgment.
In Punjab, the increasing youth migration abroad has changed the enrolment pattern in higher education (The Great Punjab Migration (2024). The Punjab enrolment in higher education declined from 29.20 percent in 2017-2018 to 27.4 percent in 2021-2022, while the national gross enrolment ratio increased over the same period to 28.4 percent (All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2021–22). Due to this change in higher education in Punjab, the faculty growth and employment have not increased proportionally, especially in technical, science, and medical education. This imbalance affected the quality of higher education, particularly in professional programs (Kaur and Singh, 2024). More recent reporting continues to place Punjab below the national higher education Gross Enrollment Ratio. At the same time, overseas study pathways that have long shaped educational aspirations in Punjab are becoming less predictable because of tighter international student policies in destination countries such as Canada. This combination makes the state’s recent move to introduce a mandatory undergraduate entrepreneurship mindset course timely, but also raises a harder question: what exactly should such a course teach?
National policy discussions are increasingly shifting from credentials to learning outcomes, employability, and the practical use of knowledge (Department of Higher Education, 2024). Entrepreneurial thinking should therefore be treated as a set of learnable competencies, not as an inherited personality trait or a narrow founder identity (Sandhu et al., 2025). Research in design and engineering education has described entrepreneurial thinking as a combination of opportunity recognition, resource leveraging, strategic risk management, resilience, communication, planning, and sustainable value creation (Sandhu et al., 2025; Sandhu et al., 2026). At first glance, these may sound like entrepreneurship terms. In professional education, these are functional requirements.
A validated module-based implementation demonstrates how entrepreneurial thinking competencies can be incorporated into the existing workflow of engineering education by aligning conventional learning activities such as problem definition, user research, ideation, prototyping, design evaluation, and project reflection with entrepreneurial tools, including the Lean Canvas (Sandhu et al., 2025). This approach aligns naturally with higher-order cognitive processes described in Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, particularly analyzing, evaluating, and creating, thereby strengthening students’ capacity to translate knowledge into real-world solutions.
A course assignment can require students to identify an unmet need, define constraints, compare alternatives, test one assumption, and explain who benefits from the proposed solution. In engineering and design, this may involve redesigning a product or process under cost, material, usability, and safety constraints. In agriculture, it may involve improving a local production or distribution process with available resources. In medicine or public health, it may involve improving a patient pathway or service interaction. In public policy, it may involve designing an intervention that is not only desirable, but feasible, affordable, and institutionally realistic.
Punjab has a strong educational base to build on. For Punjab, the most feasible implementation route is not a large new curriculum burden. It is a staged integration model. This can be operationalised through the following:
I: Rather than advocating significant new investments, Punjab must leverage existing university resources, including innovation and maker spaces, entrepreneurship centers, industry mentorship programs, and collaborative learning environments, to support entrepreneurial learning within current courses.
II: Integrate with existing project-based activities, enabling students to apply entrepreneurial tools such as the Lean Canvas while utilizing institutional resources already available.
III: Faculty development programs should equip faculty with the knowledge and pedagogical strategies to effectively implement entrepreneurial thinking.
IV: Beginning with pilot courses to evaluate effectiveness, refine teaching practices, and build institutional confidence before scaling across programs.
V: By emphasizing professional development, incremental adoption, and the strategic use of existing infrastructure, entrepreneurial thinking can be integrated into higher education with minimal additional resource requirements while maintaining institutional feasibility.
Entrepreneurial thinking, understood in this broader sense helps students ask: What is the real need? What resources do we already have? What is the smallest useful step? What can be tested quickly? What value is created, and for whom?
These questions matter beyond entrepreneurship. They are relevant to engineering, public service, agriculture, healthcare, and civic problem-solving. If Punjab wants innovation to move beyond startup events and into classrooms, laboratories, hospitals, farms, factories, and public institutions, students must learn to work with uncertainty before they enter the workforce.
Kamalpreet Sandhu, Founding Faculty of Ideate Lab & Family Business Centre, OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana (an Institute of Eminence, Ministry of Education, Government of India), Email: kamalpreet.sandhu@jgu.edu.in
Karupppasamy Subburaj, Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical and Production Engineering, Aarhus University, Denmark, Email: subburaj@mpe.au.dk