Teaching Innovation Is Not Enough: Why Industry Partnerships Must Build Sri Lanka's Next Generation of Entrepreneurs

Sri Lanka's next job creators may already be sitting in university classrooms. But entrepreneurship will not emerge from lectures and business-plan templates alone. Universities must connect young people to the problems, markets and institutions that turn ideas into resilient enterprises.

This is a national economic priority. The Asian Development Bank estimates that small and medium-sized enterprises contribute 52% of Sri Lanka's gross domestic product and provide 45% of employment. The World Bank also projects that nearly one million young Sri Lankans will enter the labour market over the next decade. Without stronger growth and investment, only around 300,000 new formal jobs are expected, leaving roughly seven in ten young jobseekers without access to a quality job.

Sri Lanka therefore needs more than a larger number of small businesses. It needs productive, technology-enabled and export-capable enterprises that can withstand shocks, enter value chains and create sustained employment. The recently launched National SME Strategy Framework, SME NEXUS, reinforces this direction through priorities such as digital enablement, incubation, market development, value-chain integration and growth finance, while setting an ambition to raise the sector's contribution to GDP from 52% to 80%.

Universities have a direct role in that ambition. Teaching design thinking, market research and financial modelling is important, but it is not the same as preparing someone to build. Resilient entrepreneurs are shaped by uncertain customers, failed prototypes, regulatory requirements, intellectual-property decisions and the discipline of delivering within real budgets and timelines. Industry partnership is the bridge between knowledge and those consequences.

The modern university must therefore operate as an entrepreneurial ecosystem, not merely as a place that teaches entrepreneurship. Students need mentors, laboratories, genuine industry briefs, multidisciplinary teams, incubation, intellectual-property support, commercialisation pathways and networks that continue beyond graduation. These experiences expose them to uncertainty while they still have a structured environment in which to learn from it.

At SLIIT, SLIIT Innovate supports this transition by bringing together business-linkage activity, SLIIT-Society Cell and the Incubator/Concept Nursery. Its work covers start-up formation, university-industry engagement, intellectual property and patenting, technology transfer, pitching and commercialisation. The purpose is not simply to celebrate ideas, but to help promising ideas move towards application and impact.

The Bentley CAE Research Unit shows what an industry-linked model can deliver. Established to provide analysis support to Bentley Motors in the United Kingdom, it has completed more than 20 projects and attracted over US$0.33 million in research funding. Students and researchers work against real engineering expectations, while industry gains access to specialised knowledge and emerging talent.

The same principle is visible in student achievement. At the International Business Plan Competition 2025 in South Korea, a SLIIT Business School team became the first Sri Lankan team to win the world championship. The challenge, developed with Korean chemical materials manufacturer Lake Materials Co., Ltd., required a financially viable and implementable ESG-led growth strategy. Success depended on combining analysis, sustainability and commercial judgement around a real business context.

Team Akura offers another example. Four final-year students from SLIIT's Faculty of Computing developed a mobile, multimodal platform using artificial intelligence to support Sinhala handwriting, pronunciation, numeracy and emotion-aware learning for children aged three to six. The solution won the 2026 AI Tool Building Challenge on OneEarth, organised by Goldsmiths, University of London. An academic project was strengthened through mentorship, international scrutiny and exposure to technology and education specialists.

SLIIT alumna Shanelle Tennekoon's journey shows how early research capability can develop over time. She graduated with First Class Honours in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, received SLIIT's Best Performance Award for the highest weighted grade point average, and won the Best Research Paper Award at SICET 2023 for an object-recognition and assistance system for visually impaired shoppers. At Curtin University, she later developed SmartWheel, a lightweight AI-powered guidance system designed to help powered-wheelchair users navigate doorway traversal and hazard detection more safely and independently.

SmartWheel received Merit recognition in both the Research and Development and Diversity and Digital Inclusion categories at Western Australia's 2026 INCITE Awards. Tennekoon also won Curtin University's 2025 Three Minute Thesis competition and a Best Presentation Award at its EECMS HDR Forum. Her progress demonstrates what can happen when technical competence, social purpose, research discipline and the confidence to communicate an idea are nurtured together.

SLIIT's membership in the Global Alliance of Entrepreneurial Universities is another step in this direction. Managed by the United Kingdom's National Centre for Entrepreneurship in Education, the Alliance connects institutions working to embed entrepreneurship across leadership, teaching, research and external engagement. Its real value will lie in using global exchange, professional development and collaboration to strengthen local pathways to impact.

Universities cannot build this ecosystem alone. Companies must offer real problem statements, mentors, data, pilot environments and routes to first customers. Investors and experienced founders should engage before a venture is fully polished. Policymakers must make it easier for young firms to formalise, protect intellectual property, access finance, meet standards and enter local and export markets. Resilient entrepreneurs are shaped by ecosystems that repeatedly connect learning with opportunity and accountability.

This does not mean every graduate must launch a start-up. Entrepreneurship education also creates more resourceful employees, stronger family-business successors, better public-sector problem-solvers and researchers who understand how to translate knowledge into use. The objective is to help more young people identify value, mobilise resources, adapt when conditions change and carry an idea through to execution.

As World Entrepreneurs' Day is marked, the useful measure is not how many seminars universities conduct. It is how many student ideas are validated with users, how many prototypes reach pilots, how many research outputs are protected or commercialised, how many ventures survive and how many partnerships create measurable value for industry and society.

Sri Lanka does not lack talented young people or worthwhile ideas. It lacks enough durable pathways from the classroom to the market. Teaching innovation is necessary, but it is not enough. When universities and industry work together to build capable, tested and resilient entrepreneurs, higher education becomes an active partner in creating the businesses, solutions and jobs on which the country's next chapter of growth will depend.