Objective of the initiative is to offer guidance for start-ups.
‘Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher’, this is exactly what the Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), an incubation centre at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA) will offer to start-ups across the country.
In a bid to provide hand-holding, mentoring and networking support to start-ups across India, the CIIE, in collaboration with leading entrepreneurs, business professionals and academicians, has started a new initiative called ‘Mentor Edge’. Although the initiative has its roots in Ahmedabad, it will be taken to different parts of the country soon.
As a part of the initiative, CIIE will also host ‘mentoring clinic’ once every month in Ahmedabad, which will provide new start-ups a platform to interact with mentors who are a part of this initiative and also meet others. The first one is scheduled to happen on December 19 at the centre itself.
Talking about the need of the programme coordinator of Mentor Edge, Aditi Gupta said, “Since CIIE’s focus has been on incubating the innovation and technology-driven venture ideas, there are other entrepreneurs who do not fall into the category and hence do not get incubation from the centre. Mentor Edge has been conceived to help these entrepreneurs.”
“Due to various reasons, start up ventures generally face difficulties while expanding business after passing a certain phase. The objective of Mentor Edge is to provide a platform where such start-up ventures can find their mentors. A proper guidance from mentors becomes the key to achieve further growth in such times,” she added.
The initiative will have different mentors in different chapters catering to different cities. The Ahmedabad chapter will have leading industrialists such as Chirag Patel of Net4Nuts; Ketal Patel of Troikaa Pharmaceuticals, Prof Sunil Handa from Eklavya
Education Foundation, Sunil Parekh, a consultant at Zydus Cadilla and professors of IIMA, including PK Sinha, Rekha Jain and others.
CIIE will receive the application of participating companies through an online process (www.mentoredge.com). Talking about the selection process, Gupta explained, “The applications will undergo an internal evaluation process to ensure that certain criteria are met, like the team must be committed, their technology must be interesting and include some kind of novelty and so on. If the applicant meets the required criteria, he/she will be assigned a senior mentor within a maximum period of two months from the date of application.”
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