Entrepreneurship Lecture Series-I

18 October, 2012

“We want to be the biggest web to print solution in India by 2014”.

These are the words of Saurabh Mehta, owner and founder of Gingko.in, who came to  MISB Bocconi campus to share his entrepreneurial journey and experiences. Set up in 2010, his  business is already churning money. 

Saurabh Mehta, who has got razor sharp clarity about the business, always knew that he would become an entrepreneur.

He said that an MBA from SDA Bocconi helped him a lot. After completing his MBA, he worked for a VC firm in India for a few years. But then as usual, something unusual happened. He struck on an  idea  and plunged into the ocean of entrepreneurship in 2011.

Saurabh Mehta flew down from Bangalore to share his perspective on  entrepreneurship. Prof. Mikkel Draebye who taught Saurabh back in 2006 in his Entrepreneurship class, invited him to share his experiences.

Prof. Draebye is an entrepreneur and Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship in SDA Bocconi.

He definitely helped us clear some myths around entrepreneurship. He said that  its not only the idea but also a strong team which is important for a startup to be successful. ' Choose your people carefully whether its partners or employees', he said.

About the idea he said that it need not be a wonderful idea  but execution of idea is what that matters.

Idea must fail quick and fail cheap, is at all it fails.

 He stressed on the fact that vision is very a important factor for a successful startup. It comes in handy when the company is growing.

We asked him if  he had, at any time of the project, any exit strategy in mind. He said that for any start up,  it is imperative to have exit strategy planned out well.

It was wonderful to meet such 'dare-to-do' guys who are ready to take pains and create rainbows of life.

Manish Pathak
MISB Bocconi
Class of 2012-2014
manish.pathak@misbbocconi.com

Industrial Visit @ ABSTC

11 October,2012

A visit to the Aditya Birla Science & Technology Company on Thursday, accompanied by Prof. Massimo Magni, Professor for OB & HRM, MISB.

The Aditya Birla Science and Technology Company (ABSTC) is the corporate research and development centre for the Aditya Birla Group. Located in Taloja, just outside of Mumbai in India, ABSTC supports the broad diversity of the Group's businesses through multi-disciplinary teams of expert scientists and engineers who lead fundamental and applied research projects.

ABSTC is the corporate R&D centre for Aditya Birla Group and an example of Indian businesses' increasing focus on  R&D, as Indian corporations spreads out globally. Interesting to note that till now only TATA group has invested in similar R&D centers.

Choosing to open up a corporate (centralized) R&D centre vis-a-vis small business R&D centres for a business conglomerate like Aditya Birla Group, brings together the expertise and innovation under one roof at its centre at Mumbai. It now looks after every need for the group including but not limited to 

• Developing in-house technologies to stop reliance on licensed technologies.
• Short term business needs for group companies ranging form fertilizer,cement,textiles etc.
• Rescaling and expanding businesses.
• Catering to long term business propositions and solutions.
• Benchmarking the products for quality assurance.
• Contract research work for other companies.

The centre has already filed 30 patents since its inception in 2006.

Learning the business application and marketing principles from the legendary CTO Mr. Luca Fountana, we looked at the business model, the organizational structure along with some of the cutting edge research work going on in the company. Some interesting take-aways :

• A corporate R&D centre as opposed to business R&D centers as in Dupont and Honeywell has its advantages, specially for long term growth.
• Dedicated in-house R&D unit for the group has financial advantages as well...tax breaks.
• Open innovation partnerships with universities help in developing fundamentally superior technologies at low cost.
• It undertakes research work for the outside non competing companies as well, thus capitalizing on it s superior facilities.

Anurag Singhal

MISB Bocconi

Class of 2012-2014

anurag.singhal@misbbocconi.com