XLRI —Xavier School of Management hosted its flagship entrepreneurship event — E-Café. The two-day event was conducted by the Entrepreneurship-Cell of XLRI, in collaboration with XCEED, the incubation centre of XLRI.
The edition of E- Café featured a series of events designed to give the participants an experience of the start-up world. Aspiring entrepreneurs from schools and colleges had got the opportunity to present their ideas at the E-Café. The event included competitions — disrupt b-plan contest for B-school students, emerging entrepreneurs for school students, and talk series.
Zeal and enthusiasm
In the national level b-plan competition, 123 teams participated. The top six teams were invited to present their business plan at XLRI. Shvan, an IIM Ranchi based startup idea, won the first prize of ₹40,000 and a round trip ticket to Singapore. The second prize of ₹25,000 was won by a team from GH Raisoni College of Engineering.
For the school students, the event featured ten prominent schools of Jamshedpur. Amitesh Jha, a student of Loyola School won the first prize and won an Amazon Kindle. Priyanka Sinha of Kerala Samajam School stood second and won Google Home Mini. Both won a round trip ticket to Singapore. The other top six finalists also received a chance to visit IIT Kharagpur which was sponsored by Learning while Travelling.
The first batch of start-ups of XCEED, was invited to set up stalls to showcase their idea. The stalls set up by the startups at XLRI were visited by XLRI students, faculty members and guests to encourage them, to keep innovating. As a part of E-Café, XCEED offered internship opportunities for college students (UG&PG) in Jamshedpur. A total of 154 students appeared for the aptitude test, of which top 20 student were shortlisted. Two students were offered the internship, post interview with Dr Rajeev Roy, Professor of Entrepreneurship at XLRI and CEO — XCEED.
Dr Roy said, “E-Café is our flagship entrepreneurship event organised with the aim of promoting and developing entrepreneurship zeal in and around Jharkhand amongst the youths from schools, colleges and B-schools. The various activities during the event was organised to develop interest towards entrepreneurship among the youth and students and make it meaningful to them.”
Entrepreneur life
The highlight was — ‘Exalt 1.0: Different routes to building Startups’ — a talk series, which aims to further student interest in entrepreneurship and give them a platform to learn from some of the best and most celebrated names in the field. .
Brijesh Agarwal, co-founder of IndiaMart, talked about the early days and the challenges he faced while setting up an internet company when there were only about 500 internet connections in the country.
Abhishek Jaiswal, founder of Antilog Vacations, talked about how he started his venture without VC money, his early failures and the lessons learnt. He talked about the importance of technology and upgrading one’s technical and financial skills in order to find success while setting up a venture of their own.