The inspirational Nagaraja Prakasam, Founder Chairman of NativeLead Foundation and Partner at Acumen Fund, spoke about how social enterprises should look at pivoting and look at this crisis as an opportunity. If an industry is non-essential, they should be able to communicate with your customers to understand them better. Also stressing on the importance of employees, he asked startups to ensure that employees are given the minimum because laying off is easy but hiring is tough. Additionally, this is an opportunity to build a more equitable society, based on fair chances, innovations, focus on necessary problems and build a cadre of social entrepreneurs who would take pride in building India.

Amit Antony Alex, India Country Director of Upaya Social Ventures, leads all efforts in identifying, coaching and investing in early stage startups while also working with social entrepreneurs to solve global development issues through a market-based approach. During the webinar, he highlighted the need for entrepreneurs to assess situations more closely and include a lot more short term planning at least in the next 2 years. Moreover, consumers in general will become more ecologically conscious which can impact businesses and this, entrepreneurs should immediately improve their cash flows. He stressed on the fact that collaborations and partnerships in these unprecedented times can be a win-win situation.

This webinar was particularly insightful for startups. Vikram Gupta, Founder and Managing Partner at IvyCap Advisors Venture Private Limited, was live in conversation with Chandradeep Mitra, a mentor at IIMCIP. Vikram Gupta has over 22 years of experience in private equity, business consulting and M&A, and has held leadership positions in various organisations in India and abroad.

For the webinar, he focused on how the pandemic crisis has impacted startups, and how digitization is the way forward. Startups working in these digital sectors will have the opportunity to scale up their businesses substantially by making sure that they are targeting the right customer segments and the products are aligned with the demands.Also, investors will now look at different ways to invest and will change their strategies accordingly.

When the startup world was adapting to the new ways of working, IIM Calcutta Innovation Park organised a webinar with Rohit Jain – Senior Associate at Singhania & Associates, New Delhi. Startup founders took away expert advice about employment contracts and relaxations rolled out by the Government Of India for Startups.

IIM Calcutta Innovation Park organized “Thinking Social” seminar in partnership with Veterans India, Bihar at NIT, Patna on 7 th September, 2019. The primary objective of this exercise was to build awareness, interest and desire to engage with the Social Enterprise Ecosystem amongst the aspiring entrepreneurs and start ups who are about to embark on their entrepreneurship journey. The seminar was formally inaugurated by Mr. Sanjeev Srivastwa, Patron, Veterans India, Bihar. This was followed by address by Mr. Amitabh Lall, CGM- NABARD, Patna.Ex Commando Rakesh Ranjan also spoke on the ocassion. Dr. Sanjeev Verma, Deputy Director, MSME, Government of India mentioned in his address that MSME has strong focus in social entrepreneurship and hence share much synergy with IIM Calcutta Innovation Park in ushering social entrepreneurship revolution in the state.In the entrepreneurship session, the following enterprising entrepreneurs shared their experience: Prantik Sinha, Founder – Agastya Buoyant; Sunandan Mukherjee, Founder – Brickcells; Kalyan Kolay, Founder – Aegipan Animal Biocare;Sidharth Vijay, Founder – Wejoy Phonefix; ,Rahul Kumar, Founder – Ecoventure. The event was attended by over 50 enthusiastic participants comprising entrepreneurs, aspiring start ups and students and members of faculty from Dayanand Sagar University.

IIM Calcutta Innovation Park organized “Thinking Social” seminar in partnership with Derbi Foundation, a business incubator under the aegis of Dayanand Sagar University at Bengaluru on 23rd August, 2019. The primary objective of this exercise was to build awareness, interest and desire to engage with the Social Enterprise Ecosystem amongst the aspiring entrepreneurs and start ups who were about to embark on their entrepreneurship journey soon.The seminar was formally inaugurated by Dr. Lakshmi Jagannathan, COO- Derbi Foundation.This was followed by address by Chief Guest, Mr. M.N. Vidyashankar, IAS (Retd.), Chairman- Derbi Advisory Board and former Chief Secretary, Government of Karnataka. In the entrepreneurship session, the following enterprising entrepreneurs shared their experience with the participants present: Mr. Prateek Kaul, Founder –Giftabled, Mr. Kalyan Siva- the founder of 5C Network,Mr. Arpit Paliwal the Founder of Happy Relliable Surgeries,Mr. Madhusudan, Founder – Ambee. The event was attended by over 80 enthusiastic participants.

IIM Calcutta Innovation Park organized “Thinking Social” seminar in partnership with School of Social Entrepreneurs and Birla Institute of Management Technology (BIMTECH), Atal Incubation Centre on 10 th August, 2019. The primary objective of this exercise was to build awareness, interest and desire to engage with the Social Enterprise Ecosystem amongst the aspiring entrepreneurs and start ups who were about to embark on their entrepreneurship journey soon.The speakers comprised Dr. Abha Rishi CEO, BIMTECH, Atal Incubation Centre (AIC) and Chairperson, Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development;Mr. Suman Mukhopadhyay, Mentor- IIM Calcutta Innovation Park;Mr. Parul Soni, Global Managing Partner, Think Through Consulting;Ms. Umang Sridhar is the founder of KhaDigi;Mr. Abhinav Girdhar is Co-founder & CEO of Bodhi Health Education;Mr. Aditya Bose is the founder of Pro Bano;Mr. Ashish Agarwal is the founder of Talento Consulting; Dr. Kamal Singh, CEO and the Executive Director of Global Compact Network India (GCNI); Mr. Shalabh Mittal, CEO- School of Social Entrepreneurs. The event witnessed around 50 participants.