It is surprising to hear people say that not many of the business plan contest winners have made it big or even got a large VC funding. Is it largely a PR exercise for the organizers or do they really mean business? But then isn’t it true that Travelguru was a Harvard Business School business plan product?
On the pessimist’s side, a first look at recent winners of B-Plan contests conducted in undergraduate schools in India gives the idea that winning B-plan contests these days has become more about great presentations and executive summaries and less about crazy, mind-blowing ideas. And this implies that B-Plans are written simply for winning and many winners could be cited acknowledging that they have no ambitions to startup with their ideas.
And what about the B-Plan contest itself?
Does it really help winners get good funding? And does it even get the right winners? The question about right judging might be more individual in nature, but the more important issue that needs to be addressed is whether the winners get what they deserve, are they just awarded money or are they hand held till they startup.
For example Conquest, the B-Plan competition of BITS provides incubation to winners till they are ready to expand alone. Since most ideas are born during picnics or cafeteria meetings, not many have the right picture of the startup scenario and so incubation becomes a necessary thing.
Coming to technology startups, participants look eagerly towards commercialization of their technology. Now consider a study conducted by Critical I ltd for BBSRC. They hold a business plan contest which specially invites biosciences related ideas. The study reveals an encouraging level of commercialization activity by past participants, with 65% of respondents having already actively commercialized their research outputs and a further 15% still actively attempting to do so.
But for the twist the report says that two-thirds of those who have commercialized their research feel that it was likely that they would have done so, regardless of the impetus provided by the Business Plan Competition (BPC). However, it is clear from qualitative research they conducted that all participants benefited significantly from the BPC, not least in motivating them to devote time and energy in making headway to their idea. One suspects that a number of respondents may, ex post facto, have over-estimated their own determination and under-estimated the impact of the BPC in that regard.
This brings us to an interesting point. Is it that BPCs aren’t given enough credit and publicity that they eventually end up looked at as unimportant stages in a startup’s life? Well a look at the winners of Conquest, the BPC of BITS, Pilani, before it went international, will prove that BPCs might just be angels in disguise. Conquest 2005, the second Conquest that was held, had the winners as Mobile Medics and runners up as Habits.in both of which were BITSian. If it hadn’t been for the furore created by Conquest an year before, these ideas might just not have been encouraged to enter the startup world. And now both of them have started up before going on a winning spree in BPCs across the globe.
The presence of hype around an event can be annoying at times, but it definitely gets people talking about it, often in awe. However, in undergraduate schools of technical nature, BPCs are often a trying experience to the purists around, those who can’t come to accept the fact that business and technology can, and in fact most often have to go hand-in-hand. In reality we are trying to get one step closer to building an industrially self-sustained India. It is definitely a better road to progress then letting other countries outsource their work to India just because of them getting cheap manpower.
BPCs might sound sophisticated, hyped-up events but the bottom line is that this new genre of a business challenge provokes people to think. It is like creating the product before the market exists. If there is so much prize luring students without any loss on their side in participating their will easily be a new creed of students dreaming of being the next Steve Jobs or Narayan Murthy! It might be that participants might just try out their hand at writing B-Plans for the sake of winning but the unexpected success might just make them give their idea a second thought.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Business Plan Contests- Hyped to glory or what?
Friday, January 25, 2008
Elevating Education Standards in India
Elevating Education Standards in India
Need for A Bottom-Up Approach
It is a fashion these days to complain about the low standards of the syllabus taught at the intermediate level (+2 level we call it). Critics argue that the syllabus is not challenging enough to make students face competitive exams. And it makes students incompetent outside India.
This is just one side of the coin. Now let us see the other, they way my natives in the village see it.
My native place is a small hamlet near the Jejuri in Maharashtra. It has Population of around a few thousand people. And there are 40 students appearing for the secondary school exams, or std. 10th every year. The wise old men of the village started the local village school five years back and the passing students’ percentage has gone up from 24% to 80% since then. Isn’t it a remarkable achievement in terms of growth? Well but it is still not up to the mark….
I live in the city of Mumbai. When I gave my SSC exams, I was in a mediocre school which was fighting out to get a good result every year. Well a good result in Mumbai means passing percentage of 98%. And there are schools which have track record of 100% for consecutive years, approximately 3 out of 10 is the scene for such schools.
So, here there is a major paradigm shift isn’t it?
We cannot elevate the standards of the syllabus until the original has become obsolete to the core, that is, even at the rural level. But does that mean that we make the upper strata wait and suffer? No, it means that our first aim should be to bring an ‘equality of opportunities’ in education. We cannot simply strive for higher standards when there is major chunk of population which is finding it difficult to stand by even the present ones.
So, what do we need? We need good teachers. Again the problem of getting good teachers into government service is quite an old one. The good teachers want to be paid good money, and it is but natural that we can’t pay them as much as they would earn by boycotting the system and starting private coaching classes. So we need to be realistic. We need incentives for the good teachers.
The problem of pulling in good teachers is prevalent only in the urban class. The rural class however faces a different version of the same problem. The teachers are driven to teaching, but, they are not qualified enough. Exact opposites as we see them. So the solution also has to be different for both.
We need to educate the eager teachers in the villages. I have seen some teachers back in my native place taking classes under the tree-shade when there was no school in the village. And well we can’t play the same in the cities. We need to pay the teachers more then we do now. The meager salary the secondary school teachers get are not exactly the kind of future the ‘Promising youth of India’ may be looking forward to. If you want them, pay them, be professional. Their morale is proportianal to their salary!
The problem of teachers being cleared, there is again the receiving end, the students. The interest from the students’ side matters more. Their interest is proportional to the teachers’ morale. And their teaching abilities depend straight on their morale.
There might arise a paradox here, we are breaking our heads to educate a generation which may not want to get educated in the first place. But then are we looking at the entire population here? There is always a larger chunk right now which is interested. The situation we face is the chunk which is not interested, lowering the success rate of the country’s educational goals by their mere presence. This can only be sorted out by creating greater awareness and interest for education. We cannot of course outcast them. So we need to absorb them. This is a parallel process that has to go on.
Also, their might just be section of students that are interested on non-conventional study, like art, physical exercise or sports. Well there is a great initiative by the Education Minister of Maharashtra Mr. Phurke that must be noted. He has taken these alternate interests into consideration and included drawing and physical education as subjects that will affect your grading or percentage in the secondary school boards, as against the previous system wherein these subjects were only meant to be passed with any marks.
However, we have to note that public policy does not always have the desired effect. My brother’s physical education teacher gave him 49/50 marks without testing him at all just because he is a favorite! Well such things really spoil the purpose of engaging these systems.
As a conclusion, what we should do is to start from the lower strata of education and raise them up to urban standards and only then work on pulling up the whole system in one single elevator!
And for that as we have seen, public policy can’t really matter, unless realization starts from within us.
This is just one side of the coin. Now let us see the other, they way my natives in the village see it.
My native place is a small hamlet near the Jejuri in Maharashtra. It has Population of around a few thousand people. And there are 40 students appearing for the secondary school exams, or std. 10th every year. The wise old men of the village started the local village school five years back and the passing students’ percentage has gone up from 24% to 80% since then. Isn’t it a remarkable achievement in terms of growth? Well but it is still not up to the mark….
I live in the city of Mumbai. When I gave my SSC exams, I was in a mediocre school which was fighting out to get a good result every year. Well a good result in Mumbai means passing percentage of 98%. And there are schools which have track record of 100% for consecutive years, approximately 3 out of 10 is the scene for such schools.
So, here there is a major paradigm shift isn’t it?
We cannot elevate the standards of the syllabus until the original has become obsolete to the core, that is, even at the rural level. But does that mean that we make the upper strata wait and suffer? No, it means that our first aim should be to bring an ‘equality of opportunities’ in education. We cannot simply strive for higher standards when there is major chunk of population which is finding it difficult to stand by even the present ones.
So, what do we need? We need good teachers. Again the problem of getting good teachers into government service is quite an old one. The good teachers want to be paid good money, and it is but natural that we can’t pay them as much as they would earn by boycotting the system and starting private coaching classes. So we need to be realistic. We need incentives for the good teachers.
The problem of pulling in good teachers is prevalent only in the urban class. The rural class however faces a different version of the same problem. The teachers are driven to teaching, but, they are not qualified enough. Exact opposites as we see them. So the solution also has to be different for both.
We need to educate the eager teachers in the villages. I have seen some teachers back in my native place taking classes under the tree-shade when there was no school in the village. And well we can’t play the same in the cities. We need to pay the teachers more then we do now. The meager salary the secondary school teachers get are not exactly the kind of future the ‘Promising youth of India’ may be looking forward to. If you want them, pay them, be professional. Their morale is proportianal to their salary!
The problem of teachers being cleared, there is again the receiving end, the students. The interest from the students’ side matters more. Their interest is proportional to the teachers’ morale. And their teaching abilities depend straight on their morale.
There might arise a paradox here, we are breaking our heads to educate a generation which may not want to get educated in the first place. But then are we looking at the entire population here? There is always a larger chunk right now which is interested. The situation we face is the chunk which is not interested, lowering the success rate of the country’s educational goals by their mere presence. This can only be sorted out by creating greater awareness and interest for education. We cannot of course outcast them. So we need to absorb them. This is a parallel process that has to go on.
Also, their might just be section of students that are interested on non-conventional study, like art, physical exercise or sports. Well there is a great initiative by the Education Minister of Maharashtra Mr. Phurke that must be noted. He has taken these alternate interests into consideration and included drawing and physical education as subjects that will affect your grading or percentage in the secondary school boards, as against the previous system wherein these subjects were only meant to be passed with any marks.
However, we have to note that public policy does not always have the desired effect. My brother’s physical education teacher gave him 49/50 marks without testing him at all just because he is a favorite! Well such things really spoil the purpose of engaging these systems.
As a conclusion, what we should do is to start from the lower strata of education and raise them up to urban standards and only then work on pulling up the whole system in one single elevator!
And for that as we have seen, public policy can’t really matter, unless realization starts from within us.
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