Pragyan 2016’s brain child Youth Business Summit was well received among the audience, be it the academicians, corporates or the young minds every one was delighted to be present at the event . Taking the idea of “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” as its main focus, Youth Business Summit in itself was an innovation to the way conventional college events were treated. It was an interesting step in their pursue to provide an interactive stage between the pioneers of today and the leaders of tomorrow. A first of its kind event saw over 150 student participants who were shortlisted amongst various applicants nation wide, and corporates in a conglomerate to promote innovation and entrepreneurship. As Dr. Srininvasan Sundararajan, Director of NIT, Trichy has beautifully put forth the purpose of the event
“An event like this being organised by students with a very professional touch, has developed the entrepreneurship skills and promoted startup activities. This approach will help the students with the right perception, with guidances from group of successful entrepreneurs, which sometimes cannot be given by a faculty.”
Leading India to its Tomorrow
The event was kickstarted with the keynote speech from Kumud Srinivasan, President of Intel India also the Chairperson of NIT, Trichy. The idea of leading to tomorrow was better explained with how the present was shaped up by a few visionaries from the past and it is the vision and innovation that is going to bring a better tomorrow. The Moore’s Law of Transistors is a perfect example of what had happened as a vision and revolutionised the technology.
“Initiatives like Digital India, Design in India, Make in India and most recently Startup India, all of that is going to further increase the demand of innovative technology. We are beginning to see innovation kick in”
The participants were given a sneak peak on the technological innovations done at Intel’s Make a Lab initiative, which was sure to motivate a few young minds to look into more of the IoTs that can be developed for not only making day to day activities easier but also how IoTs can be incorporated into conventional industries like Agriculture to produce better efficiency during harvesting.
“Collaboration between government, industries and academia is a must. That is the only way we are going to address all the big challenges that we face in India today. Youth is emerging as the unifying priority and government is focusing on skilling the youth to be the entrepreneurs that they can be.”
Enhancing Productivity in Work
The keynote was followed by one from Rajesh Srinivas, Group Executive Vice President, Yes Bank. His session was for students on how to make themselves more employable to meet the demands of the work scenario. It was a hiring strategy that can be employed in startups, corporates and industries, he also gave insights on the characteristic expectations from banks in funding startups. The main theme revolved around how entrepreneurs can hire the right personnel and how to enhance the productivity of the individual, also what are all the expectations of an ideal employee.
Raising productivity in employees whose jobs are not automated is going to be the future.
Every employee must have a short term, mid term and long term goal that should align with the vision of the company. The tricks for better hiring and assessing your hiring strategies would be communication, engagement strategy, criticality of goals and incentives in enhancing productivity, combination of talent and discipline, vaccinating ourselves from excuses, networking with a quality circle and the list goes on. Some of his quotes for young minds are
“Most of the people don’t have the courage to start, once you overcome the inertia to start then the second law of physics follows the body of motion tends to remain in motion.”
“The harder and smarter you work, the luckier you get”
“Every startup entrepreneur should be a great story teller”
“Thought leadership is more important, create positive thoughts; the achievements of today are the thoughts of yesterday.”
Driving Forward – The Automobile Revolution
The engineering minds were enthralled during this session on Amit Jain, Country Head, Electronics Group, India, Visteon Corporation. The session was started with a witty interpretation of half life period based on a study over a decade back where “the knowledge that you gain from 4 years of engineering is going to help you in the next one year or may be in three years time and after every 3 years the useful engineering knowledge that was going to help you is halved” from then on it’s going to be all about adapting to the trends. His first advise for design engineers was “What you design today, must be relevant for a driver dozen years from now. As, your design would take minimum four years to be developed, then it has to stay in the market for another 5 years (sold) and finally it should be relevant at least for the next 3 years; hence go for mega-trends that are long term
Smart is the New Green
A wide range of advancements that are revolutionising the automobile industry in terms of mobility, bricks and clicks, connectivity and convergence where IoT is playing a major part in smart cars, automotive security, gamification, augmented and virtual reality, standardization in the industry, open source patents that can be worked on and the black data that could be utilised for the betterment of tomorrow. There should be solutions that are tailored for India especially the rural India and the middle class and this is going to be a huge market in the Indian future. His end quote for the students was,
“Stay grounded to your basics, remember the principles and not the applications. See the big picture, work on real problems, don’t try to sell technology, but sell user experience. Invest your time and money on innovation and finally stay hungry and stay foolish!”
The post lunch session kick started with the much awaited panel discussion on “Make in India”Â
5 steps to a successful Tech start-up
Mentored by Sudhakar Ram, Founder and CEO, Mastek Group, this session was an exploration on how it feels to have been bitten by the startup bug. As for every individual, even for a startup, education is the fundamental step and for a tech startup the 5 steps can be listed as
- Generate the big idea
- Find a real problem
- Explore deep and wide
- Construct a business model
and finally
5. iterate, iterate, iterate
and the above steps can be solved by observing around, taking our time to start. Because it time we spend on face to face conversation that is going to help us in unearthing new pain points to address and then make a difference with a solution. His final advice to the aspiring entrepreneurs was
“Even if you hit the market early, always learn. Because it is the validated learning that is going to refine you and help you expand.”
Over all, this was definitely a conglomeration of some of the best minds working towards a common goal, that is to promote the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship. We at Techstory felt proud to be associated with the summit as social media partners, and have a strong belief that the summit definitely would have motivated the students to reach the summit of their potential.