Entrepreneurship Summit to conduct exclusive mentoring sessions for aspiring entrepreneurs for first time

“And the summit which is being conducted on Sunday will see for the first time exclusive mentoring sessions for all budding entrepreneurs,” said Ankit Agarwal, media manager.

Significantly, the ideas are diverse and come from varied sectors like information technology, rural, environment, banking, healthcare, emerging technologies, human resource, media and manufacturing among others.

E-Summit 2008 commemorates the Golden Jubilee celebrations of IIT Bombay with an overlying theme of the “emerging entrepreneurial ecosystem in India”.

“It’s proven through research that when you are mentored, your chances of success are higher. And it's our duty to sit with the young people and help them out. The entrepreneurial ecosystem in the US works well since mentors are willing to give their time,” said Raj Nair, one of the mentors and chairman of Avalon Consulting. And for another mentor Rohit Nalwade, who is the Consumer Vision CEO which is a technology start-up incubated at Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the institute, “life has come full circle”.

“We had gone through the same struggles of funding and investment when we had started out. Hence, we can relate to the students well and can certainly give them inputs on how to raise investment and do away with the initial hiccups,” said Nalwade.

The one-to-one sessions will be conducted throughout the day alongside the panel discussions and talks at the conference.

“The mentoring will be a beginning for our team of six. We have a business idea with respect to working of fuel cells. And we want to know how to raise seed capital, funding and other support system, integral to any venture,” said Praveen Maurya, an engineering graduate who will complete his MBA this year.

Close to 40 teams will be mentored in two-hour sessions wherein each mentee will get the opportunity to interact with two mentors.

For Anubhav Kaviratna, a PhD student in the department of bio-medical engineering at IIT Bombay, the mentoring is a platform that will facilitate students like him to convert their ideas into viable projects. “I have an idea in the treatment of cancer. And I want to know which industry or corporate or government funding agency I can approach for it. Also, for another idea which I have developed, I want to how it can be patented and whether I can sell it to any industry for further trials,” said Kaviratna.