Hyderabad: Experts throw insights on 'new normal' for startups

Hyderabad: A Certification Award to the budding entrepreneurs who have successfully completed the Entrepreneurship Development & Startup Management programme and a Power Talk on 'Reigniting Entrepreneurship in the New Normal' has been organised by The Entrepreneur Zone (TEZ) in association with ASPIRE, University of Hyderabad(UoH). Only the awardees were invited so as to maintain social distancing.

The theme was chosen to realign the startup world to the changing reality in the Covid-19 era. Prof Reddana, Advisor, ASPIRE, which houses 3 incubators of UoH – TBI, TIDE & BioNest – spoke about how the university was in the forefront of research, innovation and entrepreneurship. The incubators are working in the areas of Life Sciences, Pharma, Biotechnology (TBI & BioNest) and Electronics & Information Technology (TIDE), he informed and invited aspiring entrepreneurs in the area to utilise the incubation facility to take up cutting edge innovation.

Prof G Rajaram, Coordinator, TIDE, an incubator for electronics & IT startups, spoke about many startups benefited from TIDE. Dr Nandita Sethi, MD, The Entrepreneur Zone (TEZ), spoke about how TEZ collaborated with the incubators at UoH, as an Accelerator to provide the necessary business incubation to take the research and innovation to the market. TEZ provides mentorship, advisory and services support to the budding entrepreneurs so that they translate their ideas, research and innovation into a business proposition, which benefits the market and customer.

The networking event brought together people from the higher education and industry to discuss and assess the initiatives being undertaken to enable and grow the entrepreneurship ecosystem in the country.

Guest speakers spoke on the theme of 'Reigniting Entrepreneurship in the New Normal'. Divya Medar, founder of The Snacker's Street, shared her journey in the segment of frozen foods and the lessons learnt from it to start and scale up business.

Dr Ranabir Gupta, founder, Acumenicus Research, said,"today technology gives you the leverage to do business from anywhere, at any time and from resources around the world. This is a big boon that startups need to make use of." Prof V Venkata Ramana, Vice-Chair, TSCHE, and founder of TBI at UoH, shared the State's vision to develop and grow startup eco-system and promote entrepreneurship in higher education.