Business Incubation Center at University of Peshawar hosted a two-day training on 3 and 4 September 2026 for the Directorate General of Commerce Education and Management Sciences, Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, titled From Classroom to Cohort, Establishing and Running a CEIC. Rather than supporting individual startups directly, this training targeted the institutional layer one step removed, equipping commerce college faculty across the province with the capability to build and operate their own incubation infrastructure, a train the trainer approach that has the potential to multiply BIC’s own impact well beyond what a single university-based incubator could achieve on its own.
Faculty from commerce colleges across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa explored the entrepreneurship ecosystem, incubation fundamentals, and cohort design, building the practical tools needed to launch their own incubation platforms at their respective institutions. Given that the Directorate General of Commerce Education and Management Sciences oversees a network of commerce colleges spread across the province, including institutions in Abbottabad, Buner, Balakot, and Dera Ismail Khan, training faculty at this administrative level creates the potential for incubation capacity to reach commerce students in smaller cities and towns that currently sit well outside the geographic footprint of Peshawar’s more established incubation centers.
The training’s framing, moving faculty from classroom to cohort, reflects a specific and often underappreciated challenge in building incubation capacity outside major established hubs, that faculty with genuine subject matter expertise in commerce and business administration do not automatically know how to structure a functioning startup cohort, design mentorship pathways, or evaluate early stage ventures. Addressing this gap directly through structured training, rather than assuming institutional knowledge will simply develop informally over time, positions BIC as playing a capacity-building role for the province’s broader higher education network rather than only serving University of Peshawar’s own student body.
BIC’s own positioning as a hub of innovation and entrepreneurship in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa gives the training institutional credibility, drawing on its own operational experience running functioning cohorts to inform what it teaches other institutions attempting to replicate that model. The training adds to a broader pattern of institutional capacity building activity across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s higher education sector this year, complementing efforts by other regional institutions such as IM Sciences and CECOS University to expand entrepreneurship infrastructure beyond Peshawar’s largest and most established universities.
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