Some Queries - Some Answers

• How do we differentiate between Startup and a mid-sized company?

  • “According to the EU Research , one of the worlds most active Funding agencies for Innovations, a startup with headcount of Less than 250 people is a SME, Less than 50 people is a small Enterprise, and Less than 10 people is a Micro enterprise. Based on Revenue, the Captial Ceiling is 50 million Euro, 10 million Euro and 2 million Euro respectively.”

• Have you ever been "LET GO" from a company and felt blind-sided?

  • “Letting GO can happen according to me for 4 inter related reasons, Economic, Social, Political and Competence. Not all LET GO are for performance/competency related, some of them are also Economic, whereby companies cannot keep pace with "fast performers" and hence to maintain the social equilibrium within any system have to play a Political game and Let GO. Overall the system benefits as low performers get a "wake up call" and high performers are released into the "ecosystem". It is a Kruger(Jungle) out there.”

• Virtual Businesses

• Check out the concept of Micro Multinational. A term propagated in the western media and being highlighted in the next couple of books by Prof C K Prahalad is "Global Resource Leverage" with a centre at Ross School of Business, UMich and India Centre at iiit-b Some of the Indian names in this spectrum include Solidcore by Rosen Sharma in Pune, Globals Inc by Suhas Gopinath in Bangalore”

• When to use Orkut or LinkedIn or Facebook

  
  

  • “All these social based networking sites are an online version of the old traditional societal community replicas on the web. As more and more people are getting onto the virtual world, they need a place to communicate, meet and socialize. As the person is virtual, credentials of the person or his/her "persona" get created in this Virtual world, popularly known in India as "Mayajal".
    
  • Linkedin is a networking/credential building community for business/professional setup.
  • Orkut is from a social/youth site which helps you locate old friends and explore new ones.
    
  • Facebook is more of a community for creating an online persona for you, an "Avataar" if I may say so.
    
  • Have a Visual presence in the virtual world Use them for building up your brand or communicating more about yourself in short marking your presence/existence in the online world”

Imagination and Creativity @Ignition 07 at NIT K

Was invited to NIT Surathkal (previously KREC) to undertake a workshop on Entrepreneurship. 8th September 2007.

The workshop was planned as a whole day event called Ignition 07, planned by E-Forea (Ecell of NIT-K).

The workshop started with a key note by Ms Alka Goyal, VP Tavant Technologies and Founder Social way.

Our sessions started with the "Birthday Exercise" which had an excellent response.

The fact that 47 people in a crowd of 165+ shared their birthdays, reinforced the belief that at the heart of heart we are not that unique or different from one another as we expect to be.

Followed this workshop with a "Trigger your Imagination Game" where people were asked to come with unique offerings/services/products from "two pieces of A4 size paper".

The imagination and enthusiasm of the crowd was to be seen to be believed. Some of the products which were dreamed were e-lottery, Degree Certificates, Auctions of Legendary Painters like Picasso, Ozone cutting ball.

Also had a great learning that we have made our education system so rigid that any "game based" teaching is perceived to be non formal and hence non serious, found that the students missed taking notes and hence were slow in appreciating that "entrepreneurship is everywhere concept"

Did an immediate course correction with 13 slides on Seven Domains of "Road Test your business Idea" and lead it towards the "Bad Idea - Good Idea" Game.

This was the highlight of the evening with an excellent response and witty exchanges between the ideas ( both bad and good) and all of us realized that there are no bad ideas and Any Bad Idea which has a customer is a Good Idea.