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A
three-hour meeting with the
president of CEL, BITS, Srinivas Jampani, had the effect of
a tornado on me. Only, at the end of the experience, I
wasn’t left amidst debris. I had been initiated to a highly
motivated and structured organization that could leave the
common man confounded. If I had been even mildly skeptical
of him, I would have called Jampani a fanatic. However,
infectious enthusiasm and a thirst to achieve left a deep
impression on me. Yet, being able to appreciate qualities
like enterprise, un-put-downable confidence and amazing
drive was not enough – I was gasping at the end of the
meeting. Had I met the whole crowd of budding leaders at CEL,
I would have been sapped of every last iota of my energy.
Jampani’s enthusiasm, unlike that of other people of his
age, does not end with talking at length about what he would
want to achieve in life- his dreams and ideals take him to a
different strata, amongst the likes of Vivek Paul and Nandan
Nilekani – that of entrepreneurs.
He is one
of several people whose fire and passion run India’s finest
entrepreneurial organization at college level – the Centre
for Entrepreneurial Leadership at BITS.
CEL consists of eight domains
– Networks, Rural Entrepreneurship Development, Resources,
Sales and Marketing, Technology, Process Audit and HR,
Operations and Finance – each headed by a vice-president, a
membership of around 70 and is guided by able and supportive
members of the faculty. The primary goals are to increase
awareness about entrepreneurship and encourage the students
of BITS to hone their latent entrepreneurial skills and to
think out of the box. It is actively involved in bridging
gaps between the academic curriculum and the industry and
facilitating commercialization of R&D and other
resource-strapped start-ups by acting as an incubator.
All events held by CEL on
campus, are blocks in the process of building an environment
conducive to achieving these ends and have turned out to be
very professional in conduct and quality. They are brands in
the making. The most glamorous of all, could easily be the
national level event Conquest, which claims to be more than
a mere business plan contest. It tests not just the
capability of a team in making a tangible business plan but
also the participants’ mettle and guts in executing the
plan. Spread over 45 days, it includes modules on creating
the plan, preliminary judgment and mentoring of the
finalist-teams by a panel of eminent industrialists,
entrepreneurs and venture capitalists (which included Ms.
Anita Sakuru, CEO, Kenpeople, Mr. Jairaj Gupta, CEO,
WorldCast Technologies, Mr. Ravi Kuchimanchi, Aid India (of
‘Swades’ fame), Mr. Rajiv Singhal, ITC GIAN), a grueling
testing system, et cetera. The event, held during APOGEE,
was sponsored by Kenpeople, Broadcom, NewBreak and Nuware
this time. Ideas for Rural India, or I4RI, is a huge effort
to bring together the talent of students, research activity
and corporate power on the same platform to integrate them
to make tangible and worthy plans/products for execution in
rural India. Both these events have just seen their second
editions during APOGEE 2005 but have attracted as many as 80
commendable plans/entries from some of the best colleges in
India. Another new event that started off this Oasis,
Prayag (shown below), turned out to be a huge hit. It
had teams executing given businesses within a stipulated
period of time and with constraints on resources in
simulated situations.
Other regular events held on
campus include the BITS Big Bout (a panel discussion that is
aimed at bringing students’ in-room discussions under the
lens to give it a more meaningful dimension), Parampara (a
semesterly exhibition of products made in the villages
around Pilani in order to market them, with the help of
self-help groups and NGOs), the Entrepreneurship Awareness
Program (workshops to spread awareness about
entrepreneurship in North India) and the Meet the
Entrepreneur lecture series (which has successful
entrepreneurs giving lectures on entrepreneurship and
narrating their start-up stories). CEL has also successfully
spearheaded the incorporation of two courses, “Creating and
Leading Entrepreneurial Organization” and “Global Business,
Technology and Knowledge Sharing”, in the list of courses
offered as electives.
CEL has big plans in the
pipeline. An ambitious project is the “ξ Communities”, a
consortium of resource persons from the industry who would
share information and ideas with students and faculty,
through regular video-conferencing. A more exhaustive
project is the Venture Partnership Project, a plan that
resembles an internship for BITSians, or in simpler words, a
plan that involves shadowing CEOs. It would entail being
monitored by a faculty member while the student closely
follows all the activities of the member in the industry,
learning the ways of the company as well as about the traits
of the mentor. It is being envisaged as the right interface
between the students and the industry and actually promises
to be a rejuvenating experience for the mentor. Plans are
already underway to spread the modules of Conquest and I4RI
over 10-12 months and make them yearlong events.
CEL has been helped a great
deal by entrepreneurs and industrialists like Laura Parkins,
Mayank Gaur, Sanjay Kendhri, Punita Pandey, K. R.
Venkatasubramaniam, et cetera, in terms of knowledge-sharing
and sponsorship. There has also been extensive mentoring by
alumni such as Anupendra Sharma, Satish Gupta and Sirish
Kumar. CEL now looks forward to large-scale help from
alumni, especially entrepreneurs, to feed its ambitions and
hopes to build mutually rewarding relationships with them.
The only challenges that lie in its path are that of
sustaining the interest and help extended by resource
persons especially considering the short span of student life on
campus and problems posed by the location of BITS,
creditable execution of ideas.
For more info, log on to
www.celbits.org.
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