Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Kharagpur is a non-profit student organization established with the aim of fostering the spirit of entrepreneurship among college students in India. It is one of the most successful entrepreneurial organizations in the country with over 50 start-ups incubated within 10 years of its inception.
The Entrepreneurship Awareness Drive (EAD) was initiated in 2009, and has now grown to cover 24 cities in 24 days. You learn when you see, with this basic idea, EAD consists of a series of guest lectures and workshops, wherein students get to learn from the achievers of the society.
This year the esteemed presence of Mr. Vivek Prakash, Co-founder of HackerEarth, Mr.Sagar Daryani, CEO of Wow Momo, Bhavesh Manglani, Co-Founder of Delhivery, Sandeep Aggarwal, Co-Founder of Shopclues, etc, will surely impel the students and make them envision entrepreneurship as a career. The students would get to know as to what path they must choose to live their dream and turn their out-of-the-box ideas into reality.
30,000 students, 23 cities, these are numbers witnessed by the previous edition of EAD 2016, and the team looks forward to even bigger numbers this year. Ms. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Founder of Biocon, Phanindra Sama, CEO of Redbus.in, Arjun Malhotra, co-founder of HCL Technologies and many such distinguished personalities have presided over the event in the past.
The Entrepreneurship Awareness Drive also coincides with the launch of the regular round registrations for the E-Cell’s International Business Model Competition: Empresario. Empresario is an annual business model competition where business ideas in all fields ranging from Product and Service to Social, get equal opportunity to win the prize and incubation opportunities to the tune of INR 2.5 crore. The prizes and services for the winners as per the last year were worth 25 lacs INR.
This year, Entrepreneurship Cell IIT Kharagpur will be hosting Empresario 2018 in association with International Business Model Competition (IBMC). The best entries will get an opportunity to participate directly in the quarter-final rounds of IBMC 2017, which will be conducted abroad.
About 25% of the entries in last year’s business model competition- Empresario were from participants of EAD, which underlines the impact of this unique initiative towards motivating young minds towards entrepreneurial thought and action. 158 colleges participated in EAD 2016, with 23 colleges associating with E-Cell, IIT Kharagpur to conduct the EAD in their respective campus. During the drive, many colleges expressed their interest in setting up entrepreneurship promoting bodies for the benefit of young students.
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