Collaborating For Asia's Largest Entrepreneurship Summit

Come during November, and all of Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, was excited for one of the most awaited events of the year, and School of Management was not to be left behind in this aspect either. Students of SOM were pumped up to get the opportunity to collaborate with students of Entrepreneurship Cell of IIT Bombay, Entrepreneurs, C-Suite Leaders, VC Firms and Sponsors alike, for ideating and planning out the execution of Asia’s largest Entrepreneur Summit, the E-Summit 2018.

The Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Bombay is the recipient of patronage from UNESCO, Make In India, Start-up India & Digital India for its annual E-Summit which witness a crowd of around 20,000 corporates & professionals , 600+ start-ups , strong network of speakers (>110+)  including 15+ foreign speakers for the conclave spanning two days in the beautiful campus.

I, being a part of the Entrepreneurship Club at SOM, got a golden opportunity to collaborate for the Start-up Expo and Internship & Job Fair (IJF) as a PG Coordinator.

Internship and Job Fair, 2018 gives start-ups an opportunity to come down to IIT Bombay, interact with the students directly and hand-pick employees/co-founders and interns. The applicants would comprise of IITians as well as people from different domains like product development, coding, designing, marketing, finance, and operations.

Start-up Expo is a showcasing platform where start-ups can showcase and brand their product in front of 20,000 students, corporates and investors. For this purpose, we provided the entrepreneurs with a kiosk at the vantage point of E-Summit, so that they could use this opportunity to get opinions about their startup, or any new product or feature they intended to launch, or simply for highlighting themselves in the entrepreneurship community. Start-ups registering for Start-up Expo were also allowed to give internship and job offers to IIT B students and other Summit attendees and operations were taken care by our team. They also got direct entry into Investors Arena where they could network with investors from Sequoia, Saif Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, Indian Angel Network and other prominent VC firms.

As a PG Coordinator for E-Summit and a member of E-Club of SJMSOM, I was also the Point of Contact for ensuring smooth workflow between students of SOM and students of E-Cell, IIT Bombay. This was a great chance for the students of SOM to involve themselves with the intricacies of the event, be it ensuring smooth logistics, converting eminent industry leaders as guest speakers or streamlining the turnout of students from all over the world. In case of Start-Up Expo and IJF, it definitely seemed challenging to convert and get such a large number of entrepreneurs to set up their stalls at the venue, and last-minute hiccups were inevitable.

As PG Coordinators (or Coordie’s as the IIT Bombay crowd calls it ), we were to offer our managerial skills to the E-Cell, consisting of mostly B.Tech and M.Tech students of IIT Bombay. The mere scale and buzz created by the event provided an avenue for us to practically test out event management strategies. By the beginning of January, all of us were working in full form and were both pumped up for the event, as well as kept our fingers crossed that none of the start-up expo entrepreneurs don’t show up on the D-Day.

Overall, the experience gave us a good perspective as to how to envisage an event of such a humungous scale, and how to manage roadblocks that are bound to occur. Another big takeaway for us was people management skills since the E-Summit event was put together by 15+ event managers, 100+ coordinators, and 150+ organizers. When the team that you are working with is consisting of so many people, it becomes all the more challenging to ensure that everyone is aligned in the same path of execution, and being able to overcome this challenge was not only a valuable addition to our skill set, but it also increased out network among the B.Tech and M.Tech students of IIT Bombay.