IIM Ahmedabad’s startup assistance programme, iAccelerator 2009, has added one more new dimension this season — a Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) initiative. The school’s Center for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), under whose aegis the programme is being conducted, has picked four EIRs to help it identify and then work with the six startup teams that will be shortlisted by mid-April for the five-month incubation programme this year. The specific value-add that the EIRs bring to the table is that each of them come from operational backgrounds in the information and mobile technology spaces.
Meet the EIRs:
Amit Sharma: Runs his own IT consulting startup, IKWorks.in, which he started in May 2008 after a 14-year career working with Microsoft Corp., among other companies. Sharma came across iAccelerator while scouring the startup ecosystem for people for his own company and decided to sign up for the EIR programme. The startup teams he works with will be able to leverage his domain expertise in areas such as banking, insurance and manufacturing. Wont it be difficult balancing his own startup with the EIR responsibilities? “I considered that point…I’m taking this as an opportunity to be part of something bigger…I am taking a long term view here,” he says in an email interview. Sharma is the only one among the four EIRs who is already an entrepreneur. Having started his company just on the eve of the global financial slowdown, he thinks that despite the environment, now is as good a time as any for young entrepreneurs to startup. “Entrepreneurship is not as much a function of economic climate as an innate desire to start on your own…startup anytime you think you are ready,” he says.
Pankaj Chauhan: Chauhan has recently given up a career in marketing and business development to turn entrepreneur. He is currently evaluating options for his own venture in areas such as wireless healthcare and social media marketing. Retail, telecom and healthcare, the three sectors in which he has prior experience, he thinks, present abundant opportunities for young entrepreneurs. “They provide technology and marketing play, room for innovation and above all, scale,” he says in an email interview. From a marketing and business development point of view, he advises startups to carefully define their market segments and not be swayed by the broader level opportunity, do a bit of test marketing and research before committing to an idea and do a thorough competition check to build differentiation. Like Sharma, he also thinks that this is best time to startup because, “the cost of setting up is so low.”
Premnath Kommineni: Also a budding entrepreneur, Kommineni recently quit his job with a Swedish telecom application provider and is hoping to pick up some ideas for his own venture from the EIR programme. “I’ve always had the passion to startup on my own but my ideas are not so constructive. As an EIR, I will get the opportunity to explore new ideas and validate my own with industry experts,” he says in an email interview. He expects to contribute in the area of marketing, specifically product management, branding and research. His own entrepreneurial venture will most likely be in the telecom (mobile applications) space.
