Pragyan Youth Summit 2017 took place in Chennai recently. The event kicked off with some insights on the summit and was followed by the welcome address. An overview of the day’s proceedings was delivered next.
This was succeeded by the inaugural ceremony after which the morning’s keynote address was delivered by Anil Kumar Gupta, professor at the Centre for Management in Agriculture, IIM Ahmedabad, and founder of Honey Bee Network. He deliberated on the need for innovation in the Indian society.
Following the first keynote address, there was a short tea break, where attendees interacted with the speakers.
The first panel discussion on ‘Marching towards the innovation economy’ took place after the break. The discussion was moderated by Prashant Salwan, a permanent faculty at IIM Indore and alumnus of the London School of Economics and Harvard Business School.
The panellists included RB Verma, a graduate from IIT Kharagpur and an Indian Navy Commodore (Retd), Anil Wali, a IIT Delhi doctorate with several patents to his credit, Manish Gupta, Vice President at Xerox Corporation and Director of Xerox Research Centre in India, Sumanth C Raman, a medical professional who has been active in the field of healthcare IT for over 20 years, and Chandhan Potukuchi, an expert in building enterprise cloud products and services.
The discussion covered various topics, ranging from India’s capacity and potential to innovate, to the reasons why India’s global ranking in innovation is sub par. The panellists also spoke about the importance of innovation in healthcare and related areas, as well as how the Government can help bring about better innovation.
After the panel discussion, a short presentation on entrepreneur banking was delivered by Chandramouli, Deputy General Manager at SIDBI.
The second keynote address was delivered by Aloknath De, Corporate Vice President of Samsung Electronics, South Korea and Chief Technology Officer of Samsung R&D Institute in India. His talk was on ‘Grassroots innovation’, where he expounded the importance of lateral thinking in improving innovation.
The second panel discussion on ‘Inclusive innovation’ was moderated by Dhimant Parekh, Founder, thebetterindia.com.. The panellists were Kartik Desai, an executive director at Asha Impact, Ajaita Shah, CEO of Frontier Markets and President of Frontier Innovations Foundation, Priyanka Sarkar, a doctorate in biological sciences and Vice President of Programs and Policy Affairs at ICFA, and Arun Venkatesan, Chief Technology Officer at Villgro with over 15 years of experience in research and development.
The discussion was interactive and the panellists discussed the various areas that need innovation, with a primary focus on agriculture. The interactive discussion ended with a question and answer session.
The final event planned for the day, ‘Breaking barriers’ had speakers Zubin Sharma, founder and CEO of Project Potential and graduate of political economics from the University of Pennsylvania, and Amol Arora, Vice Chairman of SHEMROCK Preschools and Managing Director of SHEMFORD Futuristic Schools. The talk covered many aspects of innovative entrepreneurs and included advice on how to proceed and develop business models.