Entrepreneur 30/11/08

23 Nov, 2008

Volume 3, Issue 4

The Entrepreneur How is India affected by financial crisis?

This bronze work depicts the selfmade man in his struggle to chisel himself from common stone. Blindfolded, The Entrepreneur must trust his instincts. Not knowing if the next strike of the chisel will cut himself off at the knee or allow him to move further toward his goal, he continues unimpeded by his mistakes.

Inside this issue: Patent Management

2

Vision India 2020: Lucid

3

Smart ways of Bootstrapping

4

A Peek at Entrepreneurship Summit 09

5

Bilion Dollar Company of one employee

6

Talk by Prof. Joy Laskar

7

About us

8

"Fundamentally strong" is the phrase most often used to describe the Indian economy in this period of global financial crisis. Why then have these fundamentals, been unable to prevent the Sensex from falling below 9000 mark, or the dollar from crossing the 50-rupee mark? The free-fall of the Sensex can largely be attributed to the withdrawal of money by Foreign Institutional Investor FII’s). Last year, the total inflow by FII’s was $17bn. This year, the outflow presently stands at $10bn. This outflow has more to do with crippling foreign banks than the Indian economy. The market is falling because these foreign banks are in dire need of money. Take Morgan Stanley for example; they emptied out their entire portfolio of Rs 2200cr in two days. Consider SBI, India's leading financial conglomerate; it has beaten all projections and posted a 40% growth in its quarterly profits. Even in the case of ICICI, the bank's Indian operations posted a profit growth of 42%. However, ICICI showed an overall 27% decline due to its overseas subsidiaries. Credit for the comparative insulation of Indian banks, from the financial crisis, must be given to Dr. Manmohan Singh and his team. While framing the deregulation policies in the 90's, they made sure that banks remain sufficiently regulated. Foreign banks are also largely responsible for the fall of the rupee. Large foreign banks have been withdrawing money in rupees from the Indian market, and taking it to the US market in dollars, in order to sort out their own crisis. With the exception of the Chinese Yuan and Japanese Yen, most international currencies have weakened against the US dollar. The Yen and

Yuan have grown stronger due to unwinding carry trade, where people borrowed in cheap yen to invest in other high yielding assets. This sudden new found strength in the dollar isn't going to last long as its cause isn't fundamentally good enough for it to remain so. Today, India is not as insulated from the rest of the world as it was in the late-90s. Cross-border transactions contribute significantly to India's present economy. The Indian IT industry, more so the BPO industry, will probably be the worst hit in the following six to nine months. This hit will last until someone fills the void created by Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and other foreign banks coping with bankruptcy. The real test of the Indian economy's strong foundation will be its GDP growth rate; to see if it can achieve the projected 7.5%. (Bank to BPO contribution) While none of the economic parameters show any cause for concern, the regulators need to make sure things remain that way. Crashing markets is the first stage of any financial crisis. This will not have a significant long-term effect. Although it is unlikely that India will reach the second stage, where non-financial firms get affected, poor regulation can push the country to that stage. Otherwise, we can look forward to a healthy long term economic growth. - Abhilash B.N

Dollar vs Rupee over the last 6 months

Volume 3, Issue 4

The Entrepreneur

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The Art of Patent Management Management of patents is a central issue for the success of start-ups in the technology sector. If a company like IBM files a patent on technology developed by your start-up, you won't have first rights over the usage of your own invention. Before discussing the nuances of patent management, it is essential to understand what a patent means. An appropriate government body grants a set of exclusive and jurisdictional rights to the inventor like distribution, sale, use and export; these rights are collectively known as a patent. For obtaining a patent, an invention must satisfy three basic criteria: Novelty, Non-obviousness and Utility. Inventors who publicly disclose their invention before filing a patent lose on the grounds of novelty. An entrepreneur must therefore know 1. The level of disclosure to make in public before filing a patent 2. The parts of the invention that are patentable, and 3. Whether those parts have already been covered by any other prior art. Knowledge and Intellectual Property is a startup's prime asset. Realizing the commercial value of the intellectual property is crucial for a startup. The value it adds to the business is well depicted in Gordan V. Smith's famous book Intellectual Property: Licensing and Joint Venture Profit Strategies'.

Intellectual Property is a legal definition of ideas, inventions, artistic works and other commercially viable products that are the result of one's creativity. In the same way real estate titles and bills of sale establish ownership of tangible items, intellectual property is protected by patents, copyrights, and trademark registrations. Patent management deals with obtaining, maintaining and leveraging gains out of patents. This process involves various technical, legal and business skills. Identifying, developing and assessing the technology involved in a given patent, requires some amount of technical knowledge. Legal expertise helps understand the boundaries of the patent, scope of possible infringement, and selling or licensing the patent. The end objective is to maximize profits from the patent, which involves business skills. While numerous professionals are often involved in obtaining and maintaining patents, it is also possible for an entrepreneur to do the work by themselves. Professional help is often essential if the invention is complex and the potential profitability is high.

Some of the biggest companies in the world generate billions of dollars through efficient commercialization and licensing of their patents. Take IBM for example; they generated revenues in excess of US $1 billion from more than 30,000 live patents in 2007. The University of California, during the same period, generated over US $100 million from its 3,000-odd patents. As rightly said by Jackie Hutter, IP &Patent Business Strategist, "[The] goal of building a solid patent portfolio, is to make your business an attractive target for investment, or acquisition by a larger company.” Patent portfolio management hence involves the study, valuation and commercialization of patents. A recent study shows that 60% of all patents filed in the US are by individuals. However, as far as revenue generation is concerned, corporates make 99% of the revenue from all patents procured, leaving individuals with only 1% of the pie. This happens because individuals are not aware of the ways in which their patents can be monetized. The situation is worse in Asia because individuals here are more ignorant. To summarize, it can be said that a person who owns intellectual property must 1. Be aware about the extent of disclosure of the invention 2. Actively manage their patent portfolio 3. Analyze the value of, and exploit the patent proactively

- Kanav Hasija

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Vision India 2020: Lucid The author, Sramana Mitra, is a well known Silicon Valley Entrepreneur, who has founded 3 companies, is a Strategy Consultant for over 70 companies, including SAP and Cadence among others, and the content from her popular strategy blog at www.sramanamitra.com is syndicated by Yahoo! Finance, Indian Daily, etc. She also writes a weekly column for Forbes. This is part 3 of Sramana Mitra’s the 20 part Vision India 2020 series. For the previous two parts refer to September and October issues of The Entrepreneur. The next article in this series, Vision India 2020: Darjeeling, will be published in the February 2009 issue of The Entrepreneur.

In 2004, we started investigating the issue of K-12 education, especially in Math and the Sciences. As part of this endeavor, we interviewed a number of teachers at various high schools in the Bay Area. Two nuggets came out of these interviews (1) there is no standardized methodology of teaching (2) there is no methodology for personalized skillgap analysis. Lucid was founded upon these two core foundational blocks. They had implications well beyond the local schools and students. As Chris Kaegi, a teacher at Galileo High School in San Francisco explained, “If a teacher has to teach 50 kids per class, across 3-4 grades, it is very difficult to keep track of which kid has absorbed what’s being taught, and which one has not.” This results in a chain of problems as the child moves from one grade to the next. A “D” in 7th grade degrades to an “E” in 8th grade, followed by an “F” in 9th grade. If you don’t know how to do fractions in Algebra, how would you solve quadratic equations? With our knowledge of Artificial Intelligence, we concluded that a knowledge base of content was needed that is aligned with a methodology of teaching. This methodology would include personalized skill gap analysis, such that, a student studying Basic Algebra could be tested to identify exactly where her knowledge gap was. Be it in dealing with fractions or exponents, this knowledge base and analytics software was capable of getting to the heart of the problem. Once the problem was identified, the knowledge base had modules for teaching each one of the areas that needed focused attention. Of course, Venture Capitalists at the time hated the Education market, since some had tried to penetrate it with marginal success, including the legendary John Doerr. The conventional wisdom was that you don’t make money in education. There was a lot of truth to this assumption, since getting products into schools was an up-hill task. However, in 2008, the Web 2.0 era was fully manifest, and Web 3.0 was about to be launched. Web 3.0 turned out to be all about personalization. Against this backdrop, Lucid was launched with $8 Million in Series A Venture Capital led by a firm called Emergence Capital. It was a powerpoint financing, with no other asset yet in place. It took us 3 years of absolute stealth-mode Research & Development to come up with a scalable methodology for Math (Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Calculus) alone that covered grades 6-12. We created and licensed an enormous amount of content that aligned with the methodology at our development center in

India. We involved teachers who had particular reputations for being “great teachers,” studied their “art” at great depth, and encapsulated as much as we could into a “science.” Then came the go-to-market challenge. While we wanted this to be a worldwide service that every Math teacher at every school in every country adopted to teach every single one of their students, we had to segment the market and find a business model that would let us penetrate and get early traction. We chose to go with North America with a Web 3.0 approach. We created a Community for Middle School and High School Math teachers to interact, exchange ideas, and organically engage with one another. We also had a Community of Middle School and High School parents at each of the schools that our teachers taught in, who participated in the exchange. Most importantly, every teacher who adopted our methodology in their schools, managed to get the buy-in of the parents to pay for the service. This was very important from a business model perspective, since it allowed us to bypass the school system altogether. It also meant that our target customer base remained constrained to affluent families in North America. We did have teachers and families using our service elsewhere in the world, including India, UK, the Middle East and Australia, largely due to word-of-mouth. But by and large, we consciously chose not to fight the battle yet of tackling the less affluent or poorer segments of our eventual target audience. We accepted this segmentation reality for 5 more years, because it allowed us to refine our methodology, build company valuation, raise a great deal more financing, and expand into other subjects beyond Math, including Biology, Physics, Chemistry, World History, World Geography, English, and English as a Second Language. All the while, we grew our revenues at a 113% CAGR. We could have become profitable by 2016, but we took our time. We were addressing a big problem, and we chose to do it right. We invested in building the most remarkable Content partnerships with Discovery Channel, A&E, CNN, etc. In 2020, however, we were extremely profitable, and had an operating margin of 29% against a revenue of $3.6 Billion. And, we were so well-known as an effective methodology by 2017, that Gates Foundation came to us with a proposal to fund a roll-out of our methodology into the poorer schools all over the world. In 2020, thus, we are the leading global educational brand.

The Entrepreneur

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If You’re smart, you don’t need capital! The author, Chaitanya Sagar, is the CEO of www.p2w2.com, an online marketplace for services like writing, business consulting, research, software, online-tutoring etc. for small businesses in the US and India. Using

Volume 3, Issue 4

P2W2, you an outsource your work and get it done or take up work, deliver it and earn money.

Well I must restate it. If you are smart, you don't need much capital. I am an advocate of bootstrapping – starting a business with little or no capital. Bootstrapping minimizes cost to experiment a new idea (more ideas get tested). And it helps you instil a culture of cost consciousness in your business. But more importantly, it helps you to think outside the box and look for ways to get things done. I heard a speaker once say "Penury (poverty) is strategy" in the context of starting companies. Is it just theory or can you really implement it? Here are various ways to do that. 1. Handling your workstations: You already have your laptop/ desktop. There's no need to buy one for separately for work. Check if your employees have their laptops and if they will be comfortable using them. This cuts down on any capital you would be unnecessarily putting n to buy workstations for your company. You can also use free web space to save important material securely. This makes using personal computers less risky since, even if a few fail there is no loss of important or sensitive data. 2. Office Space: You have your dorm or your house. You don't need additional office space to start with. Usually, you also have access to the internet in these places. So the need to buy/lease that expensive office doesn't have to bother you. Most bootstrappers have started out in their garages, dorm rooms, even backyards or libraries since they did not need to bother with the logistics of an office space to work efficiently. 3. Advance Payment from customers: Ask your customers to pay in advance. There is no harm in doing this as long as you have a money-back guarantee for undelivered services or similar work policies that make customers easier to trust you with their money. Getting the cash up front takes a lot of the load off your mind and also makes you more accountable to your customers 4. Credit from Vendors: Check if your suppliers can wait a little bit or you can pay them in installments. If someone does not want to lend you, just sit in their office all day long. They will get fed up of you and will start lending. If you get money from your customers in advance, you may even be able to make little money on the float! 5. Lease. Don't buy: In case you do have to buy some inventory or company assets, its safer to lease as many

of them as you can. You need a server. But you can opt for utilitarian monthly payments as opposed to one large payment. This makes rationing your funds easier as you spend cautiously and only on what you really need at that time. 6. Employee investments: Quite a few companies offer the choice of stock options to their employees. This has the psychological effect of employees putting in better work to ensure that the company stock keeps going up. The same strategy can work for small boot-strapped businesses as well. You could ask your employees to work for stock options for part of their salary. 7. Swapping jobs: You could swap services, e.g., you are good at technology/writing/marketing while a friend is good at graphic design. You could swap those services for each other. This helps all the members involved bring out their strengths for the business. Also, this helps you to approach more customers from all fronts without limiting yourself to your core competency. 8. Smart selling: You could choose services/products that don't take too long to build, reducing the need for capital. This is a tricky matter and you need to think long before floating a company about how you will be offering your services, and what your work terms will be. 9. Short opportunities: You could take up short duration opportunities, such as dealing in designer gold jewelry during the festive season. You can experiment with low capital requirement and fast. This might not be as lucrative but usually offers good lessons and a little cash flow never hurt. 10. Stewing your idea: Work part time on your idea. In the mean time, keep your day job. Ditch the job when you make progress. That way, you can earn pocket money. You might think that you are jeopardizing your reputation and will be labeled a job-hopper if you do this often. Make sure you fulfill your immediate responsibilities at your current job before taking such a drastic step. Most if not all of the above are implementable. Check out other such ideas. We discuss many such ideas at p2w2 blog (www.p2w2.com/blog). I wish you the very best in your venture.

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A Peek at Entrepreneurship Summit 09 Entrepreneurship Summit, a two-day event organized by Entrepreneurship Cell IIT Kharagpur, is one of the biggest platforms in India, for academicians, new-age entrepreneurs, eminent business personalities, venture capitalists, and students alike, to gather and share their entrepreneurial endeavors and experiences, and to pledge to take Entrepreneurship in India to greater scales. Entrepreneurship Summit ’09, the third edition of the Summit, is scheduled for 10th and 11th January, 2009. It aims at promoting entrepreneurial awareness among the students, and will witness varieties of guest lectures by distinguished speakers, panel discussions, focused workshops and a host of events such as Case Study analysis, Business Ideas competition, etc. This year’s summit is part of the Entrepreneurship Week that is being celebrated in IIT Kharagpur, starting from the 2nd of January. The week kick starts with a guest lecture by Dominique Trempont Forbes Profile, director of 3Com and Finisar, accompanied by Sramana Mitra, who is also a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur, has founded 3 companies,

and is a strategy consultant for over 70 companies including SAP, Cadence etc. The very next day will witness the first ever Barcamp in Kolkata, at the IIT Extension Centre. A confluence of the best bosses, entrepreneurs and students will share ideas and opinions in this one-day unconference event. Lined up for the rest of the week are a panel discussion on 4th January, and a knowledge camp on alternative sources of energy on 6th. The biggest of the knowledge camps conducted thus far, promises to educate both a layman and hard core researchers, as they go about discussing the hottest topic in today’s scenario. The E-Week also includes a Venture Funding Conference, which will showcase the launch of Global Ventures Lab. It is a collaborative effort of IIT Kharagpur, University of California Berkley (UCB), USA and University of Jyvaskyla, Finland to promote Entrepreneurship and Innovation, under the theme ’Hi-Tech Growth Ventures and EducationEnterprise Model.’ The conference

will attract participation from all over India, USA, and Finland. The two new inclusions this year to the competitions category at E -summit are ‘Rede’ - The Parliamentary Debate, and Negocio - The Web Entrepreneur. While the former is a typical parliamentary debate, it is the first of a kind that solely focuses on business and entrepreneurship. The latter is a b-plan competition specifically on business models based on web technologies. The E-Week, that concludes with the Entrepreneurship Summit on 10th and 11th January, will host a myriad of lectures and workshops by eminent professionals in the field of business and entrepreneurship. Lectures by Anand Pillai, senior VP, HCL Technologies, Rajiv Dingra, founder of WATblog.com, and Aloke founder of ixigo.com, and a workshop by Fractal Analysis on Credit Risk Management will be the highlighting events during E -Summit. For more details/updates regarding Entrepreneurship Summit, visit the site www.ecell.iitkgp.ernet.in and www.ecell-iitkgp.org/esummit.

DOMINIQUE TREMPONT is an American Execu-

Sramana Mitra has been an entrepreneur and a strat-

tive and a board member in large multinational high tech companies and start-ups. His experience spans a globallyrun material science corporation to enterprise and consumer-focused software and services. Dominique is currently on the boards of three public companies: Finisar, 3Com and Energy Recovery Inc. At 3Com and ERII, Dominique chairs the Finance and Audit Committee. He obtained his Master of Business Administration from INSEAD, and a BA in Business Administration and Computer Science from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. In 1993, Dominique was recruited by Steve Jobs to turn around NeXT, first as Chief Financial Officer and later expanding to lead all operations. Dominique led NeXT’s shift from hardware to software and brought the company to profitability. Mr. Trempont has also served as CEO of Gemplus Corporation, a smart card application company, during 1999, and as President and CEO of Kanisa, an early-stage enterprise knowledge management software startup. He was also CEO-in-Residence at Battery Ventures, a venture capital firm, from September 2003 to September 2005.

egy consultant in Silicon Valley since 1994. Though her fields of experience span from hard core technology disciplines like semiconductors to sophisticated consumer marketing industries including fashion and education, her current focus however, is primarily in the realms of Web 3.0 and Enterprise 3.0, and related infrastructure. She has a particular interest in Media and Retail companies and their transition to a Web-centric world. Sramana Mitra’s popular blog article series, Vision India 2020, is being published in The Entrepreneur on a regular basis.

BarCamp is a hugely participative freeform conference (or unconference) where people talk about what they're working on. BarCamps are a lot of fun as participants get to meet a lot of like-minded people. The topic of discussion is usually related to upcoming technologies. This is the first ever barcamp being organized in Kolkata. Find out more on the official BarCamp Kolkata website http:// barcampkolkata.org/

Volume 3, Issue 4

The Entrepreneur

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A Billion Dollar Company of One Emplyee? The author, Gowri Shankar Subramanian, is the CEO and co-founder of Aspire Systems, an outsourcing product development firm, which is also winner of Deloitte’s Fast500 Asia Pacific and Fast50 India programs .

Over the last two decades, there has been an increasing trend towards outsourcing several non-core business activities. Interestingly, the definition of what is non-core keeps evolving and many core activities keep getting converted to noncore. So, what's the limit and where will the line be drawn eventually in terms of what should be done internally and what can be outsourced? Outsourcing, as a topic, has been debated extensively, but as it becomes global in nature much of the heated debate is around job losses to China and India. Leaving aside geopolitics, what needs to be looked at is how far can outsourcing go towards improving a firm's productivity (with productivity defined as revenue per employee). There has been a substantial climb in productivity over the last two decades with companies like HP, Cisco and Microsoft having revenues in excess of $500,000 per employee. While it is easy to attribute this to the IP and brand advantage enjoyed by these firms, it is also true that these firms employ tens of thousands of people in their extended outsourcing ecosystem and this allows them to constantly innovate and not be distracted by non-core activities that can be done better by an outsourcer. Given this trend, how much more can productivity levels climb? Today, all activities from order-taking to logistics, support, IT and finance are outsourceable. The rapid evolution of technology and shrinking of distances has only contributed to accelerating this phenomenon and has made outsourcing more profitable by bringing global talent to the table. What is core is now considered to be R&D, Marketing, and of course, Strategy. But even this is being questioned on an every day basis. If we are to take the example of software product firms (Independent Software Vendors), product development was once considered a core activity and hence non-outsourcable. But now things are changing with the advent of a new breed of

Outsourced Product Development companies whose only mission is to make core product development an outsourceable activity! Given this trend towards continuous increase in the scope of what can be outsourced, will we one day see a billion-dollar company with just one employee and everything else outsourced? While I might be exaggerating what is possible, this question provides a fundamental philosophy around which we can build a business outsource everything you possibly can to achieve the maximum productivity levels. Any firm has to make a call on how it will react to this trend -- either deliver a product/service and tap these outsourcing trends in every aspect of its business or become an outsourcing firm itself. While this vastly simplifies matters, it provides a premise on which to build a firm's philosophy. Outsourcing firms will employ people on a massive scale and will have lower revenues per employee, while others will focus on figuring out how best to tap the outsourcing ecosystem to build a high-value, high-productivity business. Naturally, following the tenet of speaking from experience, the question is what have we done at our firm? If everything is outsourceable, there must be someone to outsource it to and we focus on providing that service in one niche area of software product development. Traditionally, product development has been viewed as one of the core competencies of ISVs. But we firmly believe otherwise and we have helped many ISVs to change this mindset and reap benefits. Except for this specialist business activity, we try to outsource everything else required for our own internal requirements. Given what we see happening around us every day, I am sure the day is not far off when we will encounter a billion-dollar company with just one employee!

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Talk by Prof. Joy Laskar (Director of Georgia Electronics Design Centre) On the evening of 13th November 08, Prof. Joy Laskar, Schulmberger Chair in Microelectronics and director of Georgia Electronic Design Centre, met with us to give us an insight into the Entrepreneurial Process and approach to start-ups in Georgia Tech University, Atlanta. He was born in our very own Kharagpur but was brought up in Clemson, South Carolina,USA. Also present was Professor Dhrubes Biswas, Prof. in charge of Entrepreneurship and Incubation Program, who has been closely acquainted with Laskar for more than 20 years. Professor Laskar has seen-through the launch of 4 companies that deal in Integrated Circuitry (IC) and Chip design, over the last 12 years, producing a turnover of the order of $50-60 million. He started the first four IC companies in Atlanta. Professor Laskar began his presentation with a frank opening stating the obvious- the reason a person wants to become an entrepreneur is simple- to make money. He then took us through the minds of Venture Capitalists, showing us what we must take care of in order to catch their attention, gain their trust and get their funding. Firstly the idea must be good, not necessarily great. But more importantly, you must have a plan to eventually acquire a huge turnover. VCs are not going to want to put their money in a company that will get them marginal returns. He asserted the fact that, though we as technologists tend to emphasize on the technology we are selling, VCs are more interested in marketing strategies, management and your team’s executive ability than on the technology itself. Therefore, they are willing to take technology risks, but not market risks. Laksar also added that in order to gain attention of a VC, we must establish credibility in that particular ‘space’, i.e., the field in which your start-up is established. It could be done by independent validations through reference calls from either other VCs or companies considered reliable in that particular ‘space’. Thus, through this sort of networking and triangulating, what Laskar calls a ‘low pressure zone’ is created around your proposal, and this reduces apparent market risks, as VCs live in constant fear of losing the biggest deal. He then went on to stress on the importance of having a well thought out exit strategy, and told us a little about past start-ups that he has been closely associated with; namely, R-F Solutions- manufacturers of low power radio frequency products including remote controls, GSM telemetry, GSM modems, RFID and radio

modules, Quellan- a leader in Analog Signal Processing and RF Noise Cancellation ICs, Gtronixa fabless semiconductor company developing novel analog technology to extract real-world sensory information for portable consumer electronic products. He proceeded with a guide on how to deliver a powerful elevator pitch. An elevator pitch (or elevator speech) is an overview of an idea for a product, service, or project. The name reflects the fact that an elevator pitch can be delivered in the time span of an elevator

ride (for example, thirty seconds and 100-150 words). Venture capitalists often judge the quality of an idea and team on the basis of the quality of its elevator pitch, and will ask entrepreneurs for the elevator pitches to quickly weed out bad ideas and weak teams. (To view the full presentation visit: http://erc.atdc.org/ documents/perfectpitch.pdf) He ended his talk with the message that we had two very important plus-points that we must take full advantage of: the fact that we are below the age of 35 and secondly, the fact that we can provide a first person’s insight to India - currently the world’s biggest potential market. This truly enriching session ended in a question -answer round where he answered queries of the students gathered there. Laskar with his own wit and charm left us all inspired to become succesful entrepreneurs.

The Entrepreneur

IIT’s rated fifth for entrepreneurship...in the world! YouNoodle has published a list of Top University Startup Communities, and the IITs are ranked fifth aka your very own IIT Kharagpur. Since most of us are fascinated with facts, lets put it this way:

Here is the list of top universities rated by Younoodle: 1. Stanford 2. MIT

Volume 3, Issue 4

First in Bengal (Goes without saying) First in India (Ofcourse we count the other IIT’s in) First in Asia (Ahead of Tokyo University, Seoul, NUS, etc) Fifth in the World

3. University of Cambridge 4. UC Berkeley 5. IIT India

“YouNoodle develops innovative ways to bring together the information, people and technology that help start-

6. University of Oxford

ups succeed.” Basically, it is a platform for the top entrepreneurship clubs and competitions to communicate,

7. NUS, Singapore

follow members’ startups, and predict their success.

8. University of Copenhagen

If you’re form Kgp and are interesting in starting up,be

9. Stockholm University

sure to make a profile, add your startup, and join the Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Kharagpur community on

10. UC Davis

Younoodle.

Entrepreneurship Cell

Write to us at: editor.theentrepreneur@gmail. com Contact: Naveen Y.S: 9734428955 Peeyush Agarwal: 9831633161

- Provided by Younoodle

ABOUT US: Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Kharagpur is a student body which promotes entrepreneurship among students. It invites various eminent entrepreneurs to deliver lectures to educate students about the joys and hardships of entrepreneurship. Case study workshops, Knowledge Camps, patent workshops are conducted throughout the year to involve students in activities that are essential to an entrepreneur. Ecell also actively incubates startup ideas by linking the right investors with the right entrepreneurs. It does this through four competitions conducted on an annual basis: Concipio | The B-plan competition Pensez | The case study competition Ecalirez | The social entrepreneurship challenge Envision | The product design competition Ecell also conducts a 2-day event called Esummit on an annual

http://www.ecell-iitkgp.org/ theentrepreneur/

basis to invite people from all over the country to participate. The ultimate objective of Entrepreneurship Cell is to inspire more startups.