Professor Will Instruct Entrepreneurs in India

A Harvard professor now on sabbatical and a research associate will travel to India next month as part of a research project which "could hold out promises for a whole new concept of foreign aid," according to Elliott R. Danzig, Research Associate in the Laboratory of Social Relations.

David C. McCielland, professor of Psychology, and Dansig will give a two-week course in "enterpreneurial training" to a group of small businessmen in Hyderabad, India.

Danzig said the course would "try to generate a pioneering spirit" in the participants by "stimulating interest in taking moderate business risks." This could "decrease the amount of foreign aid necessary through stimulating countries to more direct action of their own part" in accelerating industrial development.

The course will be given under the joint direction of McCielland and the Small Industries Extension Training (SIET) Institute of Hyderabad. It is part of a program sponsored by the International Marketing Institute of Cambridge, a non-profit organization, to show the relationship between "training for need achievement of existing and potential enterpreneurs and the rate of economic growth in the area in which they live" according to an official description of the program.

The basic thesis of the project, which grew out of 15 years of research summarized in McClelland's book, The Achieving Society, is that by developing achievement motivation in key individuals who hold or will hold executive positions in under-developed countries, the rate of development of a particular area or region can be accelerated.

Similar courses have been offered in Mexico since 1960, and it is expected that the results of comparison between those who took the course and a test group who did not will be tabulated in the spring.

The course, largely developed by McCielland and George H. Litwin, an instructor in the Business School, is designed to produce an intensive emotional experience during which the participants may think seriously about their goals in life.

The syllabus includes such topics as understanding the role of achievement motivation in successful executive behavior, learning how to recognize and produce it in fantasy, practicing achievement-related behaviors in a "game" situation, and creative group problem-solving.

The final step of the course is the submission of a life plan involving some personal commitment for the next two years on the part of the participant in order to maintain his motivation for this span.