For a young entrepreneur in the initial stages of their venture, there are many elements to success – validation, guidance, investment, resources, connections, to name a few. Coupled with these are challenges around compliance, regulations, and financing. For our young promoters, trying to transform their ideas into a business is a struggle only compounded by lack of information about and access to all these different elements. Our institutes produce the top talent around the world but we as a nation still are not able to create a cohesive ecosystem around our institutes that can support the entrepreneurs across all these elements. Adding to this, a growing need among the corporate world, where companies are now looking outside to these entrepreneurs for innovations to support and bring in-house. They face a challenge on how to not only source innovation but foster it to create a pipeline for themselves.
Interestingly, there is one common thread that ties all these together and that is completely underleveraged in our startup ecosystem. This is network, that in some countries has proven to be a very powerful foundation for startups – it is global, it spans all sectors, brings with it expertise in every field imaginable, and most importantly a bond that is irreplaceable. This is our Alumni Networks.
Lets look at a few facts taking only one of these institutions, the IIT’s.
- IITans in senior management positions in almost all fortune 500 companies
- IITs in all senior positions of government, finance, and business
- 20% of all IITans have been an entrepreneur at least once
- 25000 companies globally founded by IITans
- Over 500 Companies started by IITans have gone to IPO
- 500,000 Alumni globally
Add to these the IIMs, ISB, BITS, NIIT, and other top engineering and management institutions in the country and we have a network and resource pool that no country can match.
At IvyCamp, Alumni and Entrepreneurs are at the core of what we are doing. Leveraging the Global Alumni networks to help our young entrepreneurs be successful by providing them with the resources and connections they need, when they need them. And providing these in via one centralized platform.
An Alumni driven corporate institute partnership has natural synergies that can be systematized. There needs to be an ongoing information flow about real world challenges that corporates are facing not only today but what they anticipate over the next few years, where they are looking to innovate. This knowledge is required to feed into the institutes to direct innovation towards some specific challenges – this has obvious benefits both for the corporate and the entrepreneur. On the flip side, innovations need a home – from a development, POC and funding perspective and corporates can provide a natural home for this. The Alumni network again provides the common connect between corporates and institutes.
Given that in India, we have the network, and the talent, it seems surprising why we have not been able to leverage this connect. The key challenge here has been the lack of a formal platform that allows Alumni to connect expressly for the purpose of innovation and entrepreneurship and a trust factor. At IvyCamp, that is what we aim to provide.
A platform where stakeholders can leverage the Alumni network for mentoring, funding, access to incubation centers, corporate connects, services and much more. Alumni at corporates can provide the connect from the other side in terms of ideas and resources. This creates an amazing opportunity for a unique type of talent collaboration from the existing corporate experts and the talent pool in our institutes.
This Alumni based entrepreneurship ecosystem is a unique and completely underleveraged powerhouse that IvyCamp has created as an end to end solution enabling alumni to come together and generate value in India’s startup ecosystem by mentoring, funding, and supporting entrepreneurs and the Educational Institutes Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystems.
