Students of IIM Bangalore’s two-year full-time Post Graduate Programme in Management (PGP), hosted annual entrepreneurship summit, Eximius 2022, on July 9 and 10, 2022.
Held after a gap of two years, the theme was ‘Start. Scale. Sail.’ The event included speaker sessions, workshops and business case competitions in the fields of marketing, finance, analytics and more.
The summit was inaugurated by Prof Rishikesha T Krishnan, Director, IIMB; Prof Sourav Mukherji, Dean, Alumni Relations and Development; Prof R Srinivasan, Chairperson of PGP and PGP in Business Analytics; and Tushar Arora, Senior Financial Specialist, The World Bank, who was also the Chief Guest.
Arora addressed the need for digital financial inclusion and women entrepreneurship, and how the World Bank has introduced simple tools like BETI, a platform which helps women entrepreneurs maintain digital records of their businesses.
Entrepreneurship as the cornerstone
Ramanan Ramanathan, First Mission Director for Atal Innovation Mission and Additional Secretary at NITI Aayog, recommended a three-pronged approach to creating a mindset of entrepreneurship in today’s students. Ashok Kamath, Chairman, Akshara Foundation, and Madan Padaki, Founder & CEO, 1BRIDGE, discussed the rise and importance of social entrepreneurship in India. Madan Padaki stressed the importance of seizing the right opportunities and said, “If you can go and create opportunity, people will take it up and adapt to it.”
In another panel discussion titled, ‘Thinking Health, Thinking Entrepreneurship’, three entrepreneurs in the healthcare field, Sohit Kapoor, Co-founder DRiefcase; Mehak Malik, Co-founder & CEO, Uvi Health, and Pritish Gupta, Dozee Health, shared their entrepreneurial journey and key learnings.
Stressing the importance of healthcare, Sohit said, “It has taken Covid for the whole world to wake up to healthcare. The biggest myth about the healthcare industry is that doctors do not like technology. In fact, the onus is on us to provide the doctors with a good solution — the use case needs to be worked out for them”.
IIMA alumni, Yashish Dahiya, Co-founder, PolicyBazaar, in his talk on: ‘How to create a start-up in entirely new space’. He said that it was IIMA which made him realize that he was meant to be an entrepreneur. While talking about start-up culture he said: “If you ask us what our culture is, it has to do a lot with selflessness”.
Manish Jethani, Co-founder of Hevo Data, in his talk on, ‘The Rise to being the Powerhouse of Data’, educated the students about the differences between B2B SaaS and B2C Saas. He also highlighted the importance of being open to technology to solve real-world problems. “If you do not know technology in the next few years, the situation will be similar to being a genius but not knowing how to speak.”
Workshops and showcases
Eximius 2022 included workshop sessions on ‘How to analyze a Stock’ by Shashank Udupa, Founder & COO, Avalon Meta, ‘Legal 101 for Start-ups’ by Jalaj Joshi, Managing Partner, Crystal Legal, and ‘How to Start your Own Podcast’ by Anurag Manik, Host, M-Square Podcasts.
The event also allowed start-ups to showcase their offerings to a diverse crowd of investors, entrepreneurs and customers. A few notable start-ups were: Phable, Readon, Neuphony, Multibashi, etc.
BzzWings, the B-plan competition organised in association with NSRCEL, the innovation and entrepreneurship hub of IIMB, had teams presenting their ideas that could shape the future of businesses. Pitcher Perfect, IIMB’s version of Shark Tank, where start-ups pitched their ideas in the sectors of healthcare and education to investors/VCs, saw a good number of budding entrepreneurs present their ideas.