Genesis 2010 event at IIT Madras

Came to know through Kiruba’s tweets that an event called “Genesis 2010” happening at Department of Management Studies in IIT Madras on Sunday, the 31st of Jan’10.

Given the fact that this event is associated with social entrepreneurhip, that too on a Sunday, with one of the two session being “Brain jam by Kiruba” I was super excited to have a peep and get a chance to network with people working on social entrepreneurship.

So, yours truly sets out to travel from Cuddalore to Chennai on the bus. on 31Jan10.

I was with an assumption that this Social Entrepreneurship competition has a big crowd from CEOs who are making business on the rural front to the students honing their business studies for plunging in to develop the rural India. But, when I arrived at the conference room at 11.00 a.m., there were only a few students numbering not more than 15 waiting for the speaker to arrive. I was the only person who is an outsider, all others being Management students of IIT.

The first session was “How to get your first customer in a venture?” by Mr. Siddarth, CEO of Aura Integrated Solutions Pvt. Ltd.  He gave an interesting talk on Marketing side with only a fewer slides which were crispy and was quite interesting. Then followed is the Q&A from the participants. Having a 15+ years of experience, Siddarth got to give out some interesting statistics on the marketing side of some of the well known local brands.

Once this session ended by 12.15 p.m. I went to Tiffany to have lunch. The next session being at 2.00 p.m. it was too long a time for me to pass. Ofcourse passed my time by reading newspaper and came back to the venue. I was bit earlier, so killed time by chatting with friends on my phone and then reading each and every notices displayed on the notice board of the Dept. of Management Studies. What to do? There is no other way I could find to pass time :D

At 2.00 p.m. Kiruba arrived to give an awesome session, there was an inflation in the number of particants now say about 40+. It started with people introducing themselves and then pointing their hand to the next folk to get introduced. Each of the participant were given a soft yellow ball and three small stickers. Folks were asked to give whatever idea they have, be it social entrepreneurship or any nice business idea; each idea is written on the board. If there is a bull shitter crapping out with a bad idea, every participant will throw the soft ball on him. This made the session get an extra funny bone as well a fool proof filtering mechanism. This was actually good, and since it’s a soft ball the victim does not get injured. Once some 15 ideas had been jotted down on the white board, its now the voting session. Participants need to stick their stickers on the top 3 ideas which fascinated them. Then the best idea is picked.

As I told you, I am the odd man out at this place, since all other guys + only one girl are students of IIT. I think absence of pre event promotion is the reason of poor crowd to this workshop. As I am running my CEO centric blog startupstory.in, I am particular in attending these kinda events. Having myself profiled interesting stories of IITians running businesses, I got to know about the wonderful incubation centre RTBI at IIT Madras headed by Prof.Ashok Jhunjhunwala. So post event, I happened to chat with the boys who were there. Themselves being management fraternity the workshop related to social entrepreneurship, I thought that they would know about the rural centric business which are being incubated at their IIT premises. But I was dumbstuck that these people have not heard of the other side of the pasture.

Such an event called Genesis 2010 with emphasis on Social entrepreneurship is a laudable one. But, the student fraternity associated with organizing this social entreneurship event being in isolation of the wonderful startup happenings at their own premises is definitely a big treasure missed just because of an absence of interaction.

I hope, a bridge will happen soon and the treasure gets discovered by these students of management on their entrepreneurial hunt. 

Moreover, the organising team has done a good show and it was really an awesome event.

See you soon guys.