~ The Entrepreneurship Week India is India’s largest campaign to build public support for entrepreneurship ~
~ 1 week of power packed campaign – 5000 events – 7 lakh participants – over 500 colleges – 30 cities ~
Bangalore, 8th March 2014: Entrepreneurship Week India 2014 unfolded today with huge excitement and exuberance amongst a massive students gathering at four regions covering 18 states and 30 cities. The E-week, an annual event driven by National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN), the flagship initiative of Wadhwani Foundation has created ripples across the country with variety of events on the theme “Innovating for India”.
The theme of this E-Week 2014 “Innovating for India” has focused on fortifying India’s innovation to enhance productivity and erase unemployment from the society. In the week of 1st March – 8th March, lakhs of people across the country came together to celebrate E- Week India. Designed to build public awareness and support for entrepreneurship, E Week India focuses public attention on today’s biggest opportunities and encourages participants to reflect on their role as leaders and innovators. The country wide campaign led by the National Entrepreneurship Network has so far been the largest entrepreneurship activity in the country. This year’s campaign has engaged over 7,00,000 participants involving support of more than 30 organizations such as corporate entities; industry captains, experts, non-profits, and faculty leaders to inspire, encourage, and guide students.
This campaign platform is primarily created to recognize and promote creativity where innovative ideas can be proposed, shared and disseminated. This will be a national register of innovations which helps any individual to accentuate his/her remarkable innovations and convert them into viable business opportunities. It will also help these remarkable innovations reach a larger audience, who could take advantage and replicate the benefits of their respective communities.
With the ever growing entrepreneurship ecosystem in India catalyzed by National Entrepreneurship Network, E Week India has become a much sought after annual event among the students and entrepreneurs community. Entrepreneurship Week India is India’s largest awareness campaign to build public support for entrepreneurship. The week-long campaign sees more than 5,000 events – from rallies and business plan competitions to expositions and start-up fairs – engaging over 500 institutions involving more than 700,000 participants across 30 cities.
Dr. K. Srikrishna, Executive Director, National Entrepreneurship Network says “NEN’s vision is to accelerate India’s economic growth by helping create and support high‐performance entrepreneurs. Students in India have tremendous potential to become entrepreneurs provided they are supported & mentored to identify and pursue their entrepreneurial dream. Since 2009 E Week has been a critical component of NEN’s commitment to building awareness and kickstarting entrepreneurial activities amongst students and building a supporting eco-system. This year with four regional finales, E Week is achieving a new milestone as the premier national entrepreneurship advocacy platform”.
This year E Week witnessed huge response from NEN academic members across the country to promote entrepreneurship and innovation. Every year, E- Leaders and Faculty leaders from these institutes lead the show and surprise everyone with their zeal, effort and thoughts to drive the E Week movement in India.
The grand finale included motivational talks by highly successful entrepreneurs, participants taking E-Week pledge to keep the entrepreneurship spirit alive by engaging in several activities on and off campus. The activities include competitions, expositions, educational movie screenings, leadership and motivation talks with successful entrepreneurs, panel discussions, business plan and skill building workshops, business and tech bazaars, awareness campaigns and more. In addition, participants has signed-up on the E-Week website (http://eweek.wfglobal.org/) sharing their experiences, view events information, and connect with the larger NEN community.
The week-long even culminated with E Week India Regional Premier Awards held simultaneously in 4 regions at Acropolis Institute of Technology and Research, Indore for central region, Sri Krishna College of Engineering & Technology, Coimbatore in South, Vivekananda Institute of Technology Campus, Jaipur in North and Institute of Engineering and Management & Dream Institute of Technology, Kolkata for eastern region. These institutes have a strong entrepreneurial eco-system in their campuses and has been driven by strong leadership by the founders & principals – Dr.K R Bagaria, Founder – VIT Campus, Jaipur, Mr.Atul Bharath, Group Director, Career Development Cell – AITR, Indore, S. Malarvizhi, Chairperson and Managing Trustee & Dr.S. Annadurai, Principal of Sri Krishna College of Engineering & Technology, Coimbatore and Dr.Satyajit Chakraborty, DIR, IEM & Dr.Dipankar Sarkar, DIR,DIT of Institute of Engineering and Management & Dream Institute of Technology, Kolkata.
Having created a buzz for entrepreneurial activities across the nation, National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) has so far built the entrepreneurial eco-system by creating 4,500 entrepreneurs, investors & professionals act as start-up resources; conducted 200 conferences, courses, workshops & webinars; trained 1,175 educators to support entrepreneurs on campuses and in communities. In 2012 -13, 5,050 entrepreneurs were supported, 705 new entrepreneurs created and 500 student start-ups formed.
About NEN
The National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) is Wadhwani Foundation’s flagship initiative in India. It was established in 2003 with a mission to inspire, educate and support high potential entrepreneurs to create millions of high-value jobs. NEN does this by building institutional capacity for entrepreneur support and a robust entrepreneurial eco-system. It was co-founded with IIT Bombay, IIM Ahmedabad, BITS Pilani, SP Jain Institute of Management and Research and the Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology.
NEN represents Asia’s largest and most dynamic community of young and future entrepreneurs.
About Wadhwani Foundation
Founded in 2003 by U.S based philanthropist, Dr. Romesh Wadhwani, the Foundation’s primary mission is economic acceleration of emerging economies. The Foundation first embarked upon its mission in India by leveraging India’s human potential. Subsequently, the Foundation has expanded into the US and other countries.
India was expected to add 250-300 million people to the workforce by 2022. Large scale job creation became the primary imperative for the country. Also, if this growing population can be adequately skilled, the impact on economy will be unprecedented. Hence, catalyzing and demonstrating scale & sustainability in job creation and skill development in India became the primary target areas of focus for the Foundation.
During the last decade, Wadhwani Foundation has launched five niche, high impact initiatives in India. These include promoting entrepreneurial and employment skills, creating opportunities for the disabled, encouraging innovation, and catalyzing policy changes to support economic activity.
In the US, to address the persistently high youth and displaced-worker unemployment issue, Wadhwani Foundation launched the ‘Race to a Job’ initiative in 2012. This Initiative leverages technology to bridge the gap between the skills acquired in academic institutes and those required by the industry for mid- skills jobs.