IITians now get start-up on campus

By Rukmini Shrinivasan/TNN

Mumbai: This summer, when the IIT hostels at Powai wear an empty look but for formally dressed final-year students hurrying off to their summer placements, a group of students will be immersed in meetings through the day and brainstorming over cups of coffee through the night. It won’t be exams, projects or complex computer codes on their minds—it’ll be their very own companies.
While the Indian Institute of Technology’s entrepreneurship cell (E-cell) has been around for eight years and a small but growing number of IITians are opting to start their own companies immediately or soon after passing out, from this year the elite institution has launched the Summer Founders’ Programme, which gives students an opportunity to work on their own start-ups during the vacation while still in college.
For many students, this means forgoing the traditional summer placement which is both safer and more lucrative. But here’s proof of how fast the entrepreneurship bug is catching on—within a couple of weeks, nearly 40 students, cutting across batches and disciplines, have signed up.
Students will be first given a month of extensive mentoring which will be followed by month-long evaluations. A panel of experts will judge which of the ideas are viable. Students can then work on these start-ups on the side once the academic year starts. “What we’ve tried to do is substantially reduce the risk factor that usually discourages students from entrepreneurship,’’ says Ankit Jain, a third-year computer student.
“This way, students can work on a start-up while they are still in the safe environment of college rather than having to opt for a traditional job after passing out,’’ says Vivek Arya, a third-year electrical engineering student.

Entrepreneurship bug bites IITians


Mumbai: The IITians, empowered with their degrees and innovative ideas, are moving away from the trodden path and building the new road for themselves to forge ahead.
“The students have on their side IIT’s brand value, the huge support system within the campus and the advantage of having friends you can team up with,’’ says Vivek Arya, a thirdyear electrical engineering student. “And what we’ve found is once you’ve been bitten by the entrepreneurship bug, you’re not going to want to get out of it that easily,’’ adds his classmate R Anand.
“The quality of the ideas coming from IIT is a definite attraction for funders, since the ideas have been shortlisted and the students extensively mentored,’’ says Prof R K Lagu, project director of Mumbai IIT’s business incubator. “More important than a change in funders’ attitudes has been a change in the student mentality,’’ says Anand. “A start-up is no longer something that you can do only after you’ve held a traditional job for two or three years,’’ he adds. With pure science, management and engineering students teaming up, many find they are moving away from their so-called area of specialisation. “Very often, students don’t really know if they want to do engineering and once they join IIT, they can’t switch streams. With a start-up, students don’t have to stick to the subject they’ve majored in and can work on their real passions, be it technology or marketing,’’ says Jain.
Both Anand and Arya have turned down summer internships at ITC to work on their own start-up. After finding that 40% of IIT’s engineering graduates were taking up management
jobs, the duo collaborated with four internationally renowned management experts to create a 25-day course for undergraduate students to give them a brief introduction to an MBA, using cutting-edge simulation techniques. The course will launch across four cities and of the 320 seats available in Mumbai, IIT students have signed up for 60. The course will also have a component very dear to the duo’s heart—entrepreneurship.







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