52 students and 3 faculty members of the PG department of VVM’s Shree Damodar College of Commerce & Economics visited the Centre for Incubation and Business Acceleration (CIBA) at Verna on 21st January 2019 at 12.00 noon. The students were addressed by Mr. Samay Shetti and Sanjay Mulvi about entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship and start-ups.
CIBA was incorporated at Verna in 2012 and has assisted around 120 start-ups. It offers assistance with developing the business plan, product develpoment, market support to entrepreneurs, funding, intermediates with potential investors and so on. Entrepreneurship means Ideation, Creativity, Innovation and Perseverance. Thinking out of the box and creating a start up was better explained by citing examples such as Byju’s learning app, Zomato and Swiggy.
The important steps for an entrepreneur begins with learning empathy and is followed doing soul searching, identifying what gets you motivated, gauging the required amount of resources, finding metrics that matter the most, hiring the right people, using incentives, experimenting and keeping one’s eyes on the future.
Overcoming the barriers to entrepreneurship was stressed upon as generally young and first generation entrepreneurs are easily demotivated with barriers such as lack of viable concepts, lack of market know-how, lack of technical skills, lack of seed capital, lack of business know-how, monopoly and protectionism, time pressures and distractions. At CIBA, entrepreneurs receive assistance in overcoming such barriers.
The session ended with a fruitful interaction between the students and the resource persons. After the session, the students were taken on a visit to the various sections of CIBA.
