Fostering the spirit of entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is about transforming ideas to market ready products and solutions. The E-summit virtual event, provided the participants an exposure to the wide array of skills that are essential to take a plunge into entrepreneurship. The live virtual event coordinated from two campuses reached over 800 students from colleges all over India. Experienced professionals and successful entrepreneurs shared their insights experience in talks, workshops and a panel discussion. Seven companies participated in the event. Five competitions tested the abilities of the participants in striking out on their own. Abhijeet Saungikar, Technical Vice President, 3M highlighted the importance of innovation in the market to succeed. Devashish Vaishnav, Founder of CoachEd and ex-President of ECell shared tips on resume building to convey one's strengths and achievements. Mekin Maheshwari, ex-CPO of Flipkart and founder of udhyam.org demonstrated how students can evaluate and make the most of the entrepreneurship opportunities. Workshop on creating a personal brand by Sezel Lalwani and Tharun Jagateri, co-founders of Fire.fly guided the students on introspecting to identify one's best abilities and highlighting them. Kalpana Ramesh, founder of Rainwater Project spoke on sustainability in entrepreneurship, sharing insights about the role social responsibility in business success. The panel discussion on impact of pandemic on startups in India brought forth how innovative thinking and empathy guides an entrepreneur to convert challenges into opportunity. Panelists, Saahil Kamath, Founder of Marsview.ai, Akarsh Shroff, Forbes India Teenpreneur 2020 and Founder, S.P.A.R.K and Suresh Narasimha, Venture Capitalist, shared insights drawn from their personal experiences as entrepreneurs and investors. The insightful interaction was moderated by Sathya Prasad. The participants got a glimpse of the nature of business competition in the games of Brand wars, Air crash, ad making, and shark tank. Midnight virtual event on crisis bidding got the participants bidding for assets on a dynamic site developed by a student team. E-summit aimed at fostering the spirit of entrepreneurship was organised by PES Entrepreneurship Cell in a virtual mode using Discord, Zoom and YouTube platforms on Nov 7-8, 2020.