Many years back I was fascinated about Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship, what is the secret of those Entrepreneurs who are creating wonderful journey, great innovation products in which the nation, investors and others are caught up. This led me to discover myself being with Entrepreneurs, thus my journey being with Entrepreneurs started very logically but technically I was not connected with any, but I started feeling that I was moving closer to real Entrepreneurs. As this was becoming real, I started realizing that those were not real entrepreneurs who were “BORN ENTREPRENEURS” nor come from a “BORN BUSINESS FAMILY”. They chose to become entrepreneurs or someone told them if you select the path of Entrepreneurship, you could be successful in that journey. I am surprised how one can choose to be an entrepreneur when he/she does not have any idea about how the journey can be (that is the whole cycle of ENTREPRENEURSHIP).
However, India has been able to create significant Entrepreneurs in the last couple of years.
As the journey moves on, I started meeting young Entrepreneurs who had genuine ideas, fantastic passion, the speed of their thought process has been tremendous. The amount of time they spend on research and implementing that idea is highly commendable. These young minds go deeper in what they do, in fact they attempt to develop models, talk to people is the way they build their career path. Here is the point, how do you build your career path must be learnt from these young bright minds. I strongly believe these are the actual Entrepreneurs as they learn from the age, which is completely tender, passionate, and confident. Nevertheless, the biggest stakeholder is the parents who have been supporting hugely and again passionately. The urge at this age is growing faster and smarter, these young minds start networking with right people and call them as mentor. This is the beauty of selecting career roadmap.
As always “BETTER the ROADMAP, BETTER the PATH”
From here, I wish to share my journey with young minds, I was nominated as “Mentor of Change” for the great ATAL Innovation Mission project initiated by NITI Aayog & me was assigned to a school called “Excel Public School” based out at Mysuru. Here I was able to meet smart, brilliant and young minds who can be titled as Entrepreneurs and Enthusiasts. Few months later, which seemed to be slow moving up it began to accelerate to design an Entrepreneurship program for these young minds, which was very much unique and first time that they were inducted to be in cohort program of the school. This was also an opportunity to hook on to ONLINE medium as the PANDEMIC started and we were restricted. The immediate future for these participants in the line of Entrepreneurship started (a career path). Adult Entrepreneurs try to exercise control over the time by relying on clocks and calendars – especially when dealing with commitments but this is just the opposite from these young ones. They set priorities and horizons of self-learning to broaden it. Wide variety of options are unlocked for the future Entrepreneurs and this would be a realization point for them to realize their dreams. This would be a path to develop skills and contacts (networking) to become a successful result-oriented Entrepreneur. However, this is the time for them to start calculating on how they could unfold their thoughts and convert it into products or services. This is what happens when they start implementing their skills to build their career and this is exactly opposite in the concept of Adult Entrepreneurs, they struggle, and many get faded slowly.
Racing to the Home
As days passes, these young minds usually concentrate to explore that they are becoming faster, smarter, and innovative in what they are doing. This is the true home coming in a simple term they become NATIVE HERO. This is what I experienced being with these young minds for a long time, I also learnt a lot through knowledge sharing. The thought process developed hugely; the intervals of my learning narrowed down, now it is easy for me to update myself immediately. Being with them every day would be like a race car that keeps accelerating towards the goal. This also taught me why we remember youth than from our recent past? So, memories were fading by being with young minds.
Furthermore, as we learn more in this Entrepreneurship journey by acquainting many knowledges, we would be called as “Knowledge Bank”, but rather we have moved to “Innovation Bank” in this 21st Century. That is why we as experienced human beings no longer compete with young minds as our source of memory particularly is getting weaker.
Nevertheless, on contrary we are contributing largely in the development of these young ones and creating career path being MENTOR. The Ecosystem of “INVESTMENT – STARTUP – ENTREPRENEURSHIP – INNOVATION” has gained lot of significance in nations like India and it has been parallel to EMPLOYMENT.
The year 2020 was a real challenge for all of us on the earth especially in the Education space. It was a big question how the student and teacher community will transfer their knowledge through ONLINE medium especially considering the situation in rural side. Some challenges were addressed, few were not. However, I wish to mention here that the institution where I am associated adopted the online medium of delivering, creating the infrastructure without any hassles and it was just moment for them. That is why the program like ENTREPRENEURSHIP was so smoother and great thus it became meaningful and successful. The result today is that the Institution has created four young start-ups who have been a great example, their perseverance has helped the entrepreneur and start-up community to learn how online medium can be so useful to learn easily, so that learning via online medium has transferred them to become an ENTREPRENEUR. If I look back at a moment of our learning journey, I find that being with these young ENTREPRENEURS the period before and after taking the course the learning curve has been expanded, the passion has increased, and the time has given vast opportunity to learn something and fuelled to be ENTREPRENEUR for NOW and FUTURE.
About the Author
Srinath Birur, is an Innovation Evangelist at Excelsoft Technologies, and Mentors early-stage startups. He is a member in Youth Leader Council at Atal Innovation Mission.