The 2nd and final day of the 2nd National Entrepreneurship Summit held at IIM Kozhikode, organized by the E-Cell hosted Ms. Parvathi Menon, Founder, Innovation Alchemy, who conducted a workshop on ‘Innovation in start ups’. Over her 15-year career in the corporate and entrepreneurial space, Parvathi has built a repertoire of knowledge in designing and implementing innovation solutions for corporate firms and she shared her journey and the lessons learnt from it with the audience.[/b]
From defining entrepreneurship to the motivation behind it, she crystallized the intangible aura that surrounds entrepreneurship. According to her, “Whatever drives to you to get through a single day of your life is what drives an entrepreneur too”. Laying stress on entrepreneurship with a purpose, she advocated the mantra -“Focus not just on an enterprise but on creating a relevant enterprise that potentially solves massive challenges and gaps.” She strongly urged budding entrepreneurs to “lift heavy weights” or in other words “make a big dent” and not just tackle problems on a small scale.[/b]
She also gave examples of successful entrepreneurial ventures and innovative business models such as Chaitanya Gurukul, a model for education in Bihar; Oorja which sells biomass based cooking stoves to rural homes, Sun King, Operation Asha and Akshay Patra.[/b]
The last speaker of the E-summit Talk Series was the young and energetic entrepreneur Sijo Kuruvilla George. He was the co-founder and head of business development, MobMe- Mobile Media and Entertainment which provides innovative solutions to mobile operators and enterprises. He is now the founder and head of Start-Up Village- an organization which assists budding entrepreneurs, especially students from college campuses in kick-starting their new ventures.[/b]
Start-Up Village is India’s first Public Private Partnership (PPP) model Technology Business Incubator. The promoters of Startup Village are Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, Technopark Trivandrum and MobME Wireless. Their aim is to incubate 1,000 product start ups over 10 years and start the search for a billion dollar company from a college campus. [/b]
Mr. Sijo Kuruvilla George shared with his audience his knowledge of and experience with entrepreneurship. He stressed on the fact that there is hardly any glamour in entrepreneurship. It’s just a lot of hard work with 2 days of glory. It is, however, “freakingly” addictive and an entrepreneur loves his addiction to risk-taking.[/b]
Sijo threw light on the current scenario in India where those who dream of their own venture hardly get any help. Technology start-up incubators are practically non-existent. Hence there was a need for an organization like Start-Up Village which tries to bring in such an eco-system and accelerates their success through their growth. Start-Up Village aims to be a PPP incubator in the dream of a Silicon coast.[/b]
The session ended with a question-answer round and marked the end of the Entrepreneurship Summit Talk Series.[/b]