For a good part of the last 6 months, we have been pondering over the absence of sufficient number of startups emerging out of Engineering Colleges. On one of our visits to VIT, Vellore; we decided to work along with VIT-TBI to have the opportunity to work with young students with ideas. As a part of this initiative we decided to setup a platform called “The Blueprints Club” through which we could bring such students together.
Yesterday was a very important day; we launched The Blueprints Club (TBC) in VIT University, Vellore.
The reason we created this platform is two fold. Firstly, for students to be able to develop their ideas, they invariably require interdisciplinary skills. In an institution like VIT, where each branch consists of more than 600 students; they rarely get to meet all of the students who are a part of their own branch, let alone other branches! It is important that the mingling of like minds takes place in order to achieve greater goals. TBC provides a platform through which students with similar thoughts, expectations and hopes can meet one another, share their thoughts and find others who have similar passions. Also, in order to keep up the morale and motivation of the students who are pursuing their own ideas, they need to be able to see those who have succeeded in the pursuit. This platform provides an opportunity for student teams to showcase what they have been doing and how far they have developed it.
Apart from this, we intend to bring in expert speakers and people from the startup eco-system to provide the students much needed knowledge and perspective about what they are trying to do.
We hope that this small step will play a huge role in the development of startup ideas within this university. We move forward with great hope and anticipation.
Any thoughts on how we can make this platform even more useful would be appreciated
Aparna
Great Idea! I hope you go long! 🙂
On the top of my head, to put it “out” there – create startup workshops, bring in entrepreneurs, have sessions like #in50hrs curated by The Startup Center, but most valuable thing would be the communitiy itself – make it social or forum like so you know what your community is buzzing and can pivot easily!
Vivek Srinivasan
Thanks for your inputs Aparna. We definitely wish to do the Hackathon on campus, we just need to develop the event
Aswin Natarajan
Great idea. Through this initiative not everyone will begin a start-up but all of them will have an entrepreneurial drive wherever they go.
How about using ‘mock’ money and do role-play ? This can be used to demonstrate fundamentals of finance, VC etc. If there is a business idea, what matters eventually is how it is executed. And execution costs money. Giving them an idea on how money works will be very useful.
Cheers,
Aswin
Vivek Srinivasan
These kids have mostly developed products, the challenge is to get them to the market. Given the Indian distribution paradigm, that tends to be a challenge. We could do the routine with the mock money, challenge is to create mock markets.
Aswin Natarajan
I feel the goal would be to create an environment to help them cope with the problems in the market than create the market itself. It can be as simple as learning how to ensure proper paperwork, cutting down office overhead, learning to cope with different people etc.
Vivek Srinivasan
Wicked! That is a nice perspective. A better way to look at it. We have actually incorporated a couple of startups at the campus already. But this is definitely an interesting way of looking at it.