From engineering to research: Willy Das’ unconventional path to entrepreneurship

Willy Das was born in Kolkata, India, to an entrepreneur father and a teacher mother. She said she’d never follow in either of their footsteps. 

Now in her fifth year as an entrepreneurship professor at Lehigh, Das has drawn influence from both career paths. 

In 2012, she began studying electrical engineering at Odisha University of Technology and Research in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India. While earning her degree, Das took a course on entrepreneurship. She said it felt like the opposite of engineering because it had no structure or definitive answers. 

After receiving her bachelor’s degree in 2016, she pivoted fields and pursued a doctorate in business policy and strategy at the Indian Institute of Management Raipur, completing her Ph.D. in 2021. After her first year, Das said she was confident in her decision to pursue entrepreneurship and fully committed, shaping her dissertation around the field. 

She said she was scared, and a lot of the time, she wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing.

She also said she was the youngest of her peers by about a decade, and most of her classmates had business backgrounds while she was new to the field. It was outside her comfort zone, but she said she embraced the challenge.

“If I get an opportunity a little bigger than what I think I am capable of, I will take it,” Das said. “I will take the risk.” 

Das said she realized entrepreneurship offered a wide scope to navigate and that business is one of the most dynamic fields, with no fixed formula for success. 

While earning her doctorate, she spoke with founders and entrepreneurs all around the world. Through these conversations, she said she recognized a communication gap between academics and business founders and saw a need to work directly with entrepreneurs in research. 

After completing her Ph.D., Das said she saw an opportunity to bridge that gap through Lehigh’s partnership with the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center. 

Samantha Dewalt, the managing director of Lehigh West, said she created Das’ position in partnership with the College of Business. Dewalt said the role was designed to co-create research projects with the stakeholders it serves.

“(Das) had a variety of skills that she could lean on in the very unique role that it was,” Dewalt said. 

After stepping into the position, Das said she shifted focus from primarily publishing academic papers to writing for online outlets, including Fortune and Harvard Business Review. She said founders don’t have time to read 40-page reports, and shorter articles are more useful and applicable to them. 

Her research focuses on topics such as networking as an introvert and entrepreneurs’ wellbeing, which she intertwines into her curriculum. 

“(Das) is able to teach strategies, mindsets, skillsets that students can take and apply in real time,” Dewalt said. 

Das also serves as the faculty mentor of Harmony and the Hustle, a student project on entrepreneurial wellbeing through Lehigh’s Creative Inquiry program. The project mirrors her own research interests.

Gianna Grillo, ‘28, has been mentored by Das since her freshman year. Das took the team working on Harmony and the Hustle to California for two and a half weeks, where they laid the groundwork for the project and interviewed founders about their experiences with wellbeing.

“Those interviews were incredibly powerful,” Grillo said. “Hearing those testimonies really validated the need for our research.”

Grillo said she meets with Das weekly to discuss progress and future plans for the project. 

“(Das) makes me feel so supported,” Grillo said. “In times of chaos, stress and any challenges thrown our way with the project, she has never once been overwhelmed. She brings us all back together.”

Das said she wants students to take agency and prioritizes instilling an entrepreneurial mindset in her teaching. She defines that mindset as being a problem-solver who leaves situations better than they found them.

To reinforce that idea, she asks students to spend a day identifying problems they encounter daily, encouraging them to continuously think of solutions. She said they must think of wild, crazy, out-of-the box ideas.

She said she consistently tells students not to limit themselves or their ideas.

Das encourages that creativity while building students’ confidence. Last semester, she took Grillo and three other students to present at a health and entrepreneurship conference at Syracuse University. Das said she acknowledged her students’ nerves and helped prepare them to speak confidently. 

“Das has been the most incredible faculty mentor,” Grillo said. “Being able to have someone like her in my Lehigh experience within my first year, has made such a huge impact on not only my time here at Lehigh, but in my life.”