IIMA Confluence 2010: Day one keeps everyone hooked

IIMA's annual business summit, 'Confluence 2010' began on a promising note with a huge turnout on the opening day. In the panel discussion themed on 'Innovations and Inclusions in Business', the speakers stressed on the need for confident continuous innovation and a thorough study of the market before plunging into it.

The speakers on the occasion were Deep Kalra, founder and CEO makemytrip.com; Arjun Uppal, head of Hariyali Kisaan Bazaar; Nikhil Rungta, marketing head, Google India; Vishal Mehta, CEO of infibeam.com and R Ramakumar, CEO of pears capital. They were glad to see a surge in students interest in entrepreneurship, a welcome change from the experience of past decades.

Kalra felt that innovation was just a medium to solve the problems of customers and added it should be the real goal of any entrepreneur, Uppal too echoed same views. He gave the instance of Hariyali Kissan Bazaar which has been set up at 300 places spread over 4 acres. This provided farmers a platform to trade their produce.

Rungta gave the example of Google products such as Google news that was born out of 20% free time that Google engineers were able to devote on personal projects. He also stressed that innovation was not an instant perfection and it took more than just a brilliant idea to be successful.

Mehta highlighted how Infibeam had applied the concept of e-commerce to the benefit of small retailers, kirana shops and the like and transformed e-commerce to i-commerce (inclusive commerce).

Today, Infibeam has over 1crore products available online and continues its growth.

In the Q&A session, the panelists agreed that innovation was a continuous movement. It was not about any particular breakthrough, but about small changes taking shape into services over a period of time.

In the events, Management Students Programme (MSP) saw the participation of 585 students from over 50 colleges from across India.