On 20th October a one day workshop on Entrepreneurship and Business: Illuminate 2019, was conducted by IIC S.P.I.T. in collaboration with E-cell ICT Mumbai and E-cell IIT-B. A pre-‘Eureka 2019’ event conducted on ICT campus mainly focused on educating the attendees about business model drafting and entrepreneurship. The workshop commenced at 10.30am with the introduction of its speaker Mr. Saurabh Jambure, product builder at Nearby Technologies and winner of several accolades, who shared his experience as an entrepreneur.
He launched into the event by breaking the famous myths about entrepreneurship and business building and gave insights about the challenges faced in the process via presentation. The answers to many common questions regarding entrepreneurship delving around the topics of an entrepreneur’s mindset, the skills required for starting up etc were also given by him. Moving on he talked about a few of the most important starter steps for any entrepreneur: the problem identification stage with the help of which a proper idea generation process can be set up followed by getting an accurate validation for the idea which could help the developer get a solid foundation to build the business. He also divulged into details of idea generating techniques to help the learners to develop something essential.
In the session that followed the lunch break, Mr.Jambure talked about the concepts of team building and retaining where he explained the necessity to have a good team for one’s start up. He also pointed out the importance of keeping things real within the team and how the foundation team can either make or break the success chances of the start up. He then discussed the basics of finance required for startups, figuring out various types of pricing strategy and funding types. In addition to that, he also shed light on terms like equity, incubator and accelerator and its importance to an entrepreneur. He then explained what is a business model, why is it essential and how any individual can make their own business model using lean startup canvas.
Towards the end of the workshop he emphasized on how an effective pitch plays an integral part in the progress of the start-up and shared some tips on how to efficiently present the idea in front of any audience. Later an activity was conducted wherein the students were asked to either form a team or individually plan business model using the knowledge gained during the workshop. After that, a mock pitch was conducted where the volunteered attendees presented their ideas to Mr.Jambure who reviewed their presentation and talked about how to tweak one’s business model/idea effectively to gather the maximum positive response. To clarify all the doubts regarding the topics discussed in the workshop, a QnA was conducted at last. The workshop concluded by 5pm with a vote of thanks and a gift of appreciation being presented to the speaker.
“The event proved to be very helpful as it cleared the idea of exactly what entrepreneurship is, wherein the speaker imparted invaluable knowledge on requirements for a successful start-up” – Prerna Arora, FE EXTC.
Report by Garima Gupta and Sumeet Haldipur