• Investment World
• eWorld
• Catalyst
• Mentor
• Life
• Canvas
• Praxis
• Urban Pulse
• Brand Quest

Our Bureau

The incubates will provide a platform for students to experience the pressures of running businesses in a competitive landscape, the pains involved in surviving, interfacing with customers and developing competitive advantage and finally growing.

BANGALORE, Feb. 5

HE could have been an academic, teaching business management. But a chance contact with the Mahaveer Academy of Technology and Sciences (MATS), run by the Jain Group of Institutions, changed the course of his life.

Mr Arun Prabhu, who joined MATS as an `adjunct faculty member' after finishing his education at the T.A. Pai Management Institute, never believed he could become an entrepreneur. Thanks to the experiment of incubating business by the Centre for Entrepreneurial Development, a cell created by MATS, he is already planning trans-national expansion of his enterprise in providing marketing solutions to consumer business.

InTouch Analytics is an offshoot of Mr Prabhu's idea, which found ready acceptance for incubation by CED with financial assistance from the businessman-promoter of MATS - a post-graduation programme in international business and information technology. The incubation project will be extended to students from next year.

Mr Prabhu is one of four such entrepreneurs, who are nursing ambitions to use the incubation experiment as a launch pad to go global.

Backing the experiment is Mr R. Chenraj Jain, Chairman of JGI and Chair Professor, Entrepreneurship, who feels his venture to mentor the programme participants would vindicate the need for a close relationship between industry and academics.

Mr Jain told Business Line: "Ideas can be converted into technology business products only through rigorous applied research. On our part, we shall be mentoring the programme participants and extending our facilities and ideas to them."

CED will provide opportunities for developing business prototypes as a prelude to commercial operations, says Mr Jain, adding that he would extend financial support from his personal resources and from his friends in addition to angel investors who circle to give the necessary push to the experiment.

Who will bear the risk of the incubates if they do not take off? "I will take the risk," says Mr Jain, whose optimism in the experiment paying off in the long run is palpable. ``MATS CED hopes to foster about 50 small enterprises in the service, trade and manufacturing sectors in the next few years."

The mission is to prepare a talent pool for entrepreneurship. Bangalore alone has a huge potential needing several one-stop services and upgradation of family-owned businesses to offer ready platform for students to come up with good business ideas for incubation.

The incubates will provide a platform for the MATS students to experience the pressures of running businesses in a competitive landscape, the pains involved in surviving, interfacing with customers and developing competitive advantage and finally growing.

An-ex-Wipro executive, whose venture, Mindsource Consulting is another incubate from CED, exults at the rapid growth of his venture started only two months ago.

Launched with a small capital provided by Mr Jain, Mindsource CEO, Mr Vasudeva Murthy, is upbeat about his company's turnover doubling to Rs 5 lakh by next year. It has already signed up with leading IT companies for their manpower requirement, says Mr Murthy.

Being an autonomous body, MATS has the flexibility to tailor-make the course design and hopes to evolve a suitable model of academy with the prime objective of being an active incubator to provide the right encouragement for bright business ideas.

It can also support entrepreneurship development programmes through workshops with active participation of leading companies to give the students the right training before they launch themselves into an active career.

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication

Stories in this Section
US keen to strengthen defence exports

Copyright © 2003, The Hindu Business Line. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu Business Line