The two day ‘Enterprising India Summit 2011’ organised by The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) ended today with 9 India entrepreneurs being introduced and recognised for successful execution of their business idea. They were felicitated for their work in the field of consumer, health and inclusive development by Kishore Biyani, Ajay Piramal and KV Kamath respectively. These noted industrialists and businessmen along with Narendra Murkumbi Shree Renuka Sugars co-hosted India’s largest conference for entrepreneurs. The conference was attended by close to 1500 delegates from across the country
Kishore Biyani stated that in order to build successful consumer focused businesses in India, entrepreneurs need to move away from income segmentation to community segmentation. Biyani highlighted the work done by entrepreneurs like Anshu Gupta from Goonj, Ashwin Mahesh- Bangalore Traffic and Sachin Bansal from Flipkart as example.
Ajay Piramal identified huge opportunity for growth in the healthcare sector as 60% of population (i.e 600 million people) has no access to modern healthcare. While introducing Varaprasad Reddy (Shantha Biotechnics), Saumil Majmudar (EduSports) and Maruti Ram from Vision Spring he said there was lot of wealth in Health.
KV Kamath while introducing Anurag Gupta (A little world), Sudesh Menon from Water Life and R Elango (Kuthambakkam) said that business should be scalable and replicable to attract funding from banks and other institutions.
Rajiv Bajaj, Managing Director, Bajaj Auto said – In India there is a huge potential for entrepreneurs as the size of the market across segments presents the first movers advantage to innovators with a breakthrough business plan. India is also unique in that it provides a certain motivation for innovation. In China, for instance, before you finish with the innovation, you might find three others working on the same thing.”
Pravin Gandhi, Member, TiE Mumbai, Board of Trustees said, "There has never been a time as conducive for entrepreneurs as it is for India today. Be it education, healthcare, infrastructure, technology all of these sectors offer very serious opportunities for entrepreneurship."
Madhu Kanan, Chief Executive Officer, Bombay Stock Exchange said that there is need to create an eco-system where Wealth Creation not only phenomenon from Tier-1 cities but also from Tier-2 and Tier-3cities. Setting up an exchange for SME enterprises is a step towards that direction.
Women entrepreneurs under the TiE Stree Shakti initiative met with angle investors like Golden Seeds, SeedFund and Avishkaar to present their business pitch and attract funding. The angle investors however, highlighted that women entrepreneurs do face the challenge of getting funds for their businesses as they are not always motivated to scale-up their business. Their efforts are to try and balance their business. While in US 6% of investments go to women entrepreneurs so is not the case in India. There is need for women entrepreneurs to understand how such funding works, what is the role of PE and VC firms in business and they should be open to involvement of outside management in their business.
Manak Singh, TiE – Mumbai said, ‘We stuck to our theme of Inspiration and Action for this year Enterprising India Summit 2011. While captains of India industries shared their knowledge and experience for creation and execution of business ideas, entrepreneurs attending the conference put to test their business ideas by meeting various investors, consultants, peers and others. TiE- Mumbai will continue to organize such sessions and programs individually throughout the year until we all meet again next year.”
