The center plans to undertake research in the areas of strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship and also to create a global knowledge base of ideas, practices and experiences for sustainable development. It will also act as a bridge that connects social entrepreneurs with thought leaders and key players in business and non-governmental organizations. It will also incubate entrepreneurial ideas and research and publish best practices, articles and books.

Go ahead with the ideas that lie cluttered in your mind and come forth with the best business plans for ESPIRE 2011 organized by E-Cell, LIBA, Chennai and get all assistance required from the Prof. C.K Prahalad Center for Emerging India to turn your power point presentations into hard reality.

Do you too have an idea? Do you dream big? If yes, then ESPIRE 2011 is the best platform to present your ideas, nurture them further in incubation centers and finally let them grow big in the vast world. ESPIRE 2011 is the 4^th edition of the Pan-India Business Plan Search of the year contest jointly organized by Loyola Institute of Business Administration, Chennai and TiE. It offers you the best chance to exhibit your business idea, convince the crowd that it is going to be a success and receive mentoring by successful entrepreneurs and incubation at the C.K Prahlad centre for Emerging India in addition to lots of cash prizes. There are also chances of you getting funded and also being able to network with venture capitalists and investors.

Come out with a wonderful Business Plan containing the superb idea that has been toying in your head for long and see it take new light. Be the Change.

Registrations are open at – http://www.liba.edu/espire

For Queries mail : info.espire@liba.edu or call 9500043773/9884637271/9003822287

Send in your executive summaries by 15^th October, 2011

The executive summary is often your initial face to a potential investor, so it is critically important that you create the right first impression. Contrary to the advice in articles on the topic, you do not need to explain the entire business plan in 250 words. You need to convey its essence, and its energy. You have about 30 seconds to grab an investor’s interest. You want to be clear and compelling.

Espire 2010 – Executive Summary Tips

Forget what everyone else has been telling you. Here are the key components that should be part of your executive summary:

1. The Grab

You should lead with the most compelling statement of why you have a really big idea. This sentence (or two) sets the tone for the rest of the executive summary. Usually, this is a concise statement of the unique solution you have developed to a big problem. It should be direct and specific, not abstract and conceptual. If you can drop some impressive names in the first paragraph you should—world-class advisors, companies you are already working with, a brand name founding investor. Don’t expect an investor to discover that you have two Nobel laureates on your advisory board six paragraphs later. He or she may never get that far.

2. The Problem

You need to make it clear that there is a big, important problem (current or emerging) that you are going to solve, or opportunity you are going to exploit. In this context you are establishing your Value Proposition—there is enormous pain and opportunity out there, and you are going to increase revenues, reduce costs, increase speed, expand reach, eliminate inefficiency, increase effectiveness, whatever. Don’t confuse your statement of the problem with the size of the opportunity (see below).

3. The Solution

What specifically are you offering to whom? Software, hardware, service, combination? Use commonly used terms to state concretely what you have, or what you do, that solves the problem you’ve identified. Avoid acronyms and don’t try to use these precious few words to create and trademark a bunch of terms that won’t mean anything to most people. You might need to clarify where you fit in the value chain or distribution channels—who do you work with in the ecosystem of your sector, and why will they be eager to work with you. If you have customers and revenues, make it clear. If not, tell the investor when you will.

4. The Opportunity

Spend a few more sentences providing the basic market segmentation, size, growth and dynamics—how many people or companies, how many dollars, how fast the growth, and what is driving the segment. You will be better off targeting a meaningful percentage of a smaller, well-defined, growing market than claiming a microscopic percentage of a huge, heterogeneous, mature market. Don’t claim you are addressing the $24 billion widget market, when you are really addressing the $85 million market for specialized arc-widgets used in the emerging wocket sector.

5. Your Competitive Advantage

No matter what you might think, you have competition. At a minimum, you compete with the current way of doing business. Most likely, there is a near competitor, or a direct competitor that is about to emerge (are you sufficiently paranoid yet??). So, understand what your real, sustainable competitive advantage is, and state it clearly. Do not try to convince investors that your key competitive asset is your “first mover advantage.” Here is where you can articulate your unique benefits and advantages. Believe it or not, in most cases, you should be able to make this point in one or two sentences.

6. The Model

How specifically are you going to generate revenues, and from whom? Why is your model leverageable and scaleable? Why will it be capital efficient? What are the critical metrics on which you will be evaluated—customers, licenses, units, revenues, margin? Whatever it is, what impressive levels will you reach within three to five years?

7. The Team

Why is your team uniquely qualified to win? Don’t tell us you have 48 combined years of expertise in widget development; tell us your CTO was the lead widget developer for Intel, and she was on the original IEEE standards committee for arc-widgets. Don’t just regurgitate a shortened form of each founder’s resume; explain why the background of each team member fits. If you can, state the names of brand name companies your team has worked for. Don’t drop a name if it’s an unknown name, and don’t drop a name if you aren’t happy to give the contact as a reference at a later date.

8. The Promise

When you are pitching to investors, your fundamental promise is that you are going to make them a boatload of money. The only way you can do that is if you can achieve a level of success that far exceeds the capital required to do that. Your Summary Financial Projections should clearly show that. But if they are not believable, then all of your work is for naught. You should show five years of revenues, expenses, losses/profits, cash and headcount. You should also show a key driver or two, such as number of customers and units shipped each year

9. The Ask

This is the amount of funding you are asking for now. This should generally be the minimum amount of equity you need to reach the next major milestone. You can always take more if investors are willing to make more available, but it is hard to take less. If you expect to be raising another round of financing later, make that clear, and state the expected amount.

You should be able to do all this in six to eight paragraphs, possibly a few more if there is a particular point that needs emphasis. You should be able to make each point in just two or three simple, clear, specific sentences.

This means your executive summary should be about two pages, maybe three. Some people say it should be one page. They’re wrong. (The only reason investors ask for one page summaries is that they are usually so bad the investors just want the suffering to be over sooner.) Most investors find that there is not enough information in one page to understand and evaluate a company.

Please remember that the outline above should not be applied rigidly or religiously. There is no template that fits all companies, but make sure you touch in each key issue. You need to think through what points are most important in your particular case, what points are irrelevant, what points need emphasis, and what points require no elaboration.

Hope you found this info useful.

Deadlines for submission : October 10th 2010.

Good Luck

Mr.Ramaraj took us through an excellent My Story Session where we learnt his failures and successes and how to step ahead after every fall. It is really a dream come true to have these people of such calibre come to our campus and talk about how to generate an idea, put in paper and implement. Their experience is invaluable and we were able to envision ourselves as entrepreneurs in the future.  What they learned over the years was transferred to us in speech in 2 hours time.

Definitely while they were speaking, there would have been some lights of ideas glowing here and there among students.

Check out the photos on our Facebook Page

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Chennai/Espire/126292247419737?ref=ts

Students from a lot of colleges in Chennai attended the inaugural workshop and went back totally contented. After the first workshop there were four workshops conducted all over TamilNadu with speakers of this calibre.

GRG School of Management Studies – Coimbatore

Kalaignar Institute of Technology – Coimbatore

SKP College of Engineering – Tiruvannamalai

SRM University Vadapalani Campus – Chennai

Immediate Workshops –

1. SRM Kaatangulathur – Wed – 29/10/2010
2. Madras University – Wed – 29/10/2010

There are more coming up. Keep watching this space.

We are back with an awesome new.. We have the fourth and the energetic partner who has joined in recently to sweep through all the colleges in the country!! Guess who?? It is the National Entrepreneurs Network fondly called NEN. LIBA also has an ECELL moderated by NEN, which is instrumental in conducting this Business Plan Competition every year at LIBA. So guys who are all associated with NEN in any way are most welcome to join the journey of this competition and recommend your able friends and colleagues to get their grey cell working. With 2 weeks in hand what a man cannot do???

You can visit the NEN page http://bit.ly/dxiB9z for details on ESPIRE 2010. ESPIRE Team is celebrating the entry of our New Partner. Come be a part of us!

The Press Launch happened on Sept 14,2010 with 20-25 different journalists from various TV channels/newspapers and magazines had come to witness and record this launch..

If you get to know about the great people who presided this occasion, you would get goose-bumps if you are a wannabe entrepreneur. These people would inspire everyone of us in some way or the other.

Mr.Lakshmi Narayanan, Vice Chairman of CTS presided the function. Did you hear it right? Yes!! It is The Lakshmi Narayanan who came LIBA campus to share about his Story of a man next door to this position in the “My Story Session”.

Mr. Lakshmi Narayanan has been a technology industry professional for over 30 years, building and managing divisions and business units in Europe, India and the United States. Mr. Lakshmi’s experience spans organizational strategy, customer relationship management, corporate governance, risk management, and operations. As a founding member of Cognizant, he has been responsible for providing leadership for the company’s high-touch customer relationship and delivery excellence model. Under his leadership, Cognizant became the youngest IT services company to reach a billion dollar revenue milestone, and also went past a market capitalization of $10 billion.

In the inauguration speech, Shri Lakshmi Narayanan said, “In his inaugural address Lakshmi Narayanan, Vice-Chairman, Cognizant Technology Solutions, said the Micro Small and Medium Enterprises were the backbones of any sector in a country. They contributed up to 75 per cent of the GDP and provided 75 to 80 per cent employment opportunity.”

The next person in the Big 3 is:

Mr. Ramaraj – Of course we all know him..

Mr. Ramaraj, was the Co- Founder and CEO of Sify Limited, Sify was the first Indian Internet company to be listed on the Nasdaq National Market in the US

He was recognized as the ‘Evangelist of the Year’ at the India Internet World Convention in September 2000.  And in 2001, in a CNET.com poll in India, He was voted the IT Person of the Year 2000.

Currently He is the Senior Advisor at Sequoia Capital and is a member of the global Board of Trustees of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs). He is the first Indian to be invited to the Board of directors of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). He is a member of the Board of Governors of the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.

Another very important person who is instrumental in conducting this event is:

Mr. Sudeep Jain

He is from the 1994 Batch of IAS. He is currently posted as Commissioner Rural Development (Training) and Special Officer, Entrepreneurship Development Institute, (EDI) Government of Tamil Nadu

He is a B.E (Hons) EEE from BITS Pilani, an MBA (Marketing/Finance) from JNV University, Jodhpur and is a Hubert Humphrey Fellow from University of Washington, USA

He has held numerous prestigious Government Administrative positions, a few of the notable positions are Sub Collector, Tuticorin. Commissioner, City Corporation, Tirunelveli. Collector, Dharmapuri and Nagapattinam. MD, ELCOT.

He has numerous achievements under his belt. He had doubled tax collection at Tirunelveli, Municipal Corporation. He had received the  National Award for paperless office at ELCOT and also Increased profits by 24 times at ELCOT. Guinness World Record twice in tree plantation at Nagapattinam in 2003. He installed the first ever floating pontoon bridge on a National Highway at Nagapattinam in 2002. Increased sports coaching camps participation from 5000 to 93,000 in 2009 as MS, SDAT. Won the prestigious Business Plan Competition at University of Washington in 2007.

Oh my god!! These achievements can go on and on..

This is only one half of the story you heard.. The other half was an awe-inspiring workshop by Mr.Swaminathan, Mr. Chandu Nair and our very own Professor Dr. JK.. All in the next post.. Keep watching..

Here’s the agenda for the inaugural on September 14th

INAUGURATION AND PRESS MEET

AGENDA – WORKSHOP: ROAD TO SUCCESS

DATE: 14th SEPTEMBER 2010

The stage is set for the official ESPIRE launch. Its going to be a exciting and inspiring evening for all the aspiring entrepreneurs of tomorrow.. After all that what ESPIRE 2010 is all about.

Do you need to have an idea to enter into this contest? Well.. Nobody is born as an entrepreneur. Our aim is to infuse the sense of entrepreneurship in people who want to achieve great in life. ESPIRE shows you the Road To Success by conducting workshops enabling wannabe entrepreneurs convert their smallest of ideas into a Business Model that would work. There is going to be a series of workshops all over India to take you through Ideation to Business Plan Formulation. I am sure the people who attend these workshops will try to generate ideas to submit to this event or at least we would have succeeded to make you think on a long term perspective as an entrepreneur.

Let’s say that you have got your idea and business plans perfectly ready. Do you think it is worth being implemented? We have got mentors to refine your thought process and they will tell you what the investors look for in a business. You win!! They win!! So if you give what the investors want you naturally would have got what you wanted. ESPIRE gives a one-one mentoring session before you come down to Chennai for the Mock Investment Round. By now you would have known the do’s and don’ts in an industry.

Mock Investment round is a unique round to enable you to market your product or services in front of an investor or a venture capitalist!! Did you hear it right??  Yeah!! You get to meet 25-30 venture capitalists and angel investors and pitch in. Your plan and pitch would be evaluated for the financial viability of the project and how revolutionary it may be. An entrepreneur not only generates ideas and plans. He also packages it in a way it is attractive to the investors and consumers! It is MOCK Investment as in you are not getting funded if you win this round but it takes you to the next round with more points and confidence. Now you would know if your plan is capable of being funded based on your pitch on the day. ESPIRE leaves this round to the creativity of the team and the team can bring anything to woo an investor

Do I need to tell you about the final presentation? Well the finalists get to meet all the VCs, Mentors and experts from various fields and successful entrepreneurs. TiECon is something which anyone doesn’t want to miss. Finalists get to meet hundreds of like minded people who would be interested in your business. One more highlight is that we invite the Top 25 teams for the start up showcase in Chennai during the TieCon. Can you get another platform like this??? You just have to make it to the Top 25.

Networking – The key to success. Word-of-mouth is considered to be the most efficient form of advertising and you get it in such a high fashion through ESPIRE. Of course your relation with ESPIRE does not get over on that day. You also get courses at LIBA and membership in TiE Chennai.

Are you geared up for the challenge?

From a cycle that runs on water and land, a scooter-powered flour mill, a solar mosquito killer, a cycle-powered washing machine — these are just a few of the over 100,000 outstanding innovations that have come from school dropouts and poor people from rural India. Education had no part in many of them. In fact, most of them would have not come up with this if they had the ‘education’ we have. Then, with that little push, that helping hand, imagine how many more of them would have come out of their shells with confidence about life? How much more smoother life would be? How many more of our myriad problems would have solutions?

But why go there? Look at our own management institutions. Life is not all about mugging up and spitting fundas. It is about being able to apply them even if you have no goddam idea what exact funda you are using to arrive at your success. India produces managers in 1000s every year. We have some of the best institutions in the world for management education. And still, we seldom see these ‘managers’ taking a risk and getting out to try their hand in starting something up. Most of them end up working under some Tata or Birla or Ambani according to the written rules and unsaid norms. No time to think out of the box in that mad rush. No one has anything different to offer. The ones that get out of the line and try something out come to less than 10% of the total pass outs every year. Why? What is wrong with our system? Is it the dependence on GPAs or is it the classroom ambiance? Or is it the money component? Or is nothing wrong at all? Food for some random thoughts…

MBA may not mean entrepreneurship. But the ones who come in wishing to start up a small something of his own, end mugging up ‘data’ and getting grades and rushing ahead so they dont fall behind and eventually forget to imbibe the real knowledge a management education offers. Finally he or she gets placed in a mechanical corporate world where his or her creativity and individuality gets curbed. Is that what they came for? Does it utilize his or her full potential? Does it even recognize what someone’s full potential is?