Maybe it’s a tradition or maybe it all began during the days when we couldn’t fix the toy car, yet our parents looked dotingly as we showed glimpses of “geniusâ€, even with five thumbs. We still tried to fix, create and provide a solution to the audience of our imagination. Since then, innocent enterprises became a gateway to a life of freedom and choices. As we became more worldly wise, our thoughts got labeled and detailed logic became known simply as framework.
One such label is Entrepreneurship, one of the most mystical of words across campuses worldwide. Year on year, people enter the gates to start something, with a sense of courage and purpose one can partly claim to originate from the valley and partly to the Hugo inspired minister. In engineering schools, the desire was to come up with the next big product, the most complex circuit which would resemble a Noah’s Ark of chips and batteries, and would also prove a point. Years later, in B-Schools, the desire metamorphosed (not exactly the word, but yes, you get the point) to conceive something more strategic, and of course, that’s the basic idea.
But the charm of entrepreneurship lies also in the value added during the process. It enables real income generation even multiple rungs down the activity chain. And that is the most commendable part of the enterprise, in creating, raising and maintaining an economic independence of people who are even indirectly associated with the process. And primary to this is the vision of the entrepreneur, his courage, conviction and undying commitment in the face of all odds. I plan to profile a few of our students and alumni on their journey through ideation, risks and self discovery on what they perceive their future to be.
 A new venture, which is owned by the husband wife duo of Abhishek-Chandrani (ISB, Class of 2009) and not yet a full fledged venture, is a healthy foods outlet hosted from the campus cafeteria. I have watched the execution quite closely as A-C went about planning their work till they finally decided to work their plan. The plan which started on paper during the Planning an Entrepreneurship Venture (PaEV) curriculum culminated to a big bang launch during the annual Alumni meet, Solstice 2008. PaEV is an innovative exercise @ the ISB where students can actually go the whole nine yards from ideating to creating a business venture, as a part of a credit curriculum. The plan needs to be defended on all strategic and operational aspects in front of bankers, VCs and other successful entrepreneurs.
A-C have identified the healthy foods connection, clinically separated it from “health foodsâ€, connected with the officials at School for logistics and permissions, convinced the cafeteria authorities for space to host the outlet, managed the equipment, decided on the menu, employed a paid staff, managed suppliers and the inventory, priced products, designed the promotions, and just recently executed a masterstroke in consumer behavior by introducing an offering called Mind Booster in the placement season. All of it while they toiled the backbreaking ISB schedule. This exercise was primarily meant to assess market reactions and also to pilot execution capability. A-C have been B-School fundamentalists in motion since the owners applied in the afternoon concepts they learnt in the morning and with real investments at stake. For the owners, to identify the connection from concepts to customers will be a vital aspect of the study.
On the other end of the spectrum lies Adib Ibrahim’s Invention Labs (IL) incorporated from Chennai. A unique company which primarily does product development, its succinctly stated desire is to be “India’s inventorsâ€. A lofty desire indeed and that makes it so much more fascinating. But unlike many new ventures that we come across from B-School alumni, IL perhaps addresses an area oft neglected in the Indian context, product design and development. It’s an area where engineering, management, creativity and consumers coalesce and who have experienced it will tell you, it is an unambiguously a tough proposition. To run your own enterprise out of that is tougher still.
And the uniqueness is there as well. In India most startups concentrate on a service which is quite different from product development. The initial stages are common across enterprises where the market research is to be established. However for product development there are myriads of other factors to be considered. Engineering factors coupled with user centric design at the high level, filtering them to low level requirement specs for the developer, modularity aspects, and complex decisions in make or buy of allied technology, all come together. The hardware design, the software algorithms, for embedded systems the accompanying board support, finally the hardware software integration followed by months of acceptance testing. Added to that, constant interaction with vendors for sourcing of components, outsourcing certain mechanical or electro-mechanical tasks to other SMEs and in between all these, preparing several reams of documentation as the product goes for an industry specific standards compliance and certification. This is the minimum that has to be done. Each of these waterfall steps are visited multiple times in an iterative fashion as the product goes for multiple reviews and defect proofing. Discrete teams and oft-changing requirements create an integration nightmare where the architecture has to be constantly smoothed and occasionally revamped.
Those who have been involved in product development would tell you, its backbreaking work and can be deeply frustrating at times. A simple one line defect can put off the schedule for weeks. The entire process takes months of intense labor with actually burning the midnight oil. Market pressure for the product release adds its bit to the process. But on the judgment day, when after months (sometimes years, depending on the industry) the machine works, it’s a feeling unparalleled in sensibility, to a level that it raises a sense of nostalgia.
Here’s wishing A-C and Invention Labs (http://inventionlabs.in/about.html) a successful road ahead.
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