Starting trouble

Indian entrepreneurship forums are today confined to showcases, contests and networking. It’s time they think bigger, and turn entrepreneurship into a way of life

Promoting entrepreneurship is good business these days. Pull together a few like-minded people, formulate a vision statement, throw in a business plan contest or a startup showcase, invite a few venture capitalists and big industry executives, announce an annual or bi-annual conference, and you’re in business. Of course, not to forget, invite young entrepreneurs to participate in the jamboree.

If anything has epitomised the resurgence of entrepreneurship in India in the past two to four years, it is the mushrooming of formal and informal forums that seek to encourage young people to take to entrepreneurship as a career. We’ve picked out just a few that are top of mind at present.

There’s Proto, run by a Chennai-based team, which positions itself as the country’s first startup showcase platform. Giving them competition is the HeadStart Foundation, driven largely out of Bangalore. In Mumbai, the Wadhwani Foundation’s National Entrepreneur Network (NEN) is just closing off its ‘Hottest Startups’ contest, which will attempt to select the country’s five hottest startups via a public voting exercise.

Then, there are a bunch of business plan contests run by premier business schools like the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Alongside are business plan contests run by venture capital firms such as Canaan Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. And finally, there are the more informal BarCamps, OpenCoffee Clubs and Mobile Monday meets that have sprung up in almost every Indian city in the past couple of years. These are slightly different from the rest because they are pure networking forums that desist from a formal structure.