- Punjab all set to become startup incubation zone
NewZNew (Chandigarh) : Startup weekend conducted by Progressive Punjab in association with Startup Accelerator Chamber of Commerce resulted in churning out of 16 unique startup ideas that are set to make Punjab Startup Incubation Zone of the world.
The weekend, which was conducted from 23 October to 25 October, was conducted with a motive to put Punjab at a prominent position on the startup map of India by Progressive Punjab at entrepreneur development center at EDC IT Park Chandigarh. The 54 hour duration event was inaugurated by Mr. Manjit Brar MD Milkfed and Joint CEO of Invest Punjab 2015 and Mr. Manipal Dhariwal, President SACC. The other dignitaries present at the launch were serial entrepreneur Mr. Nitin Monga-founder We Excel Software and CEO One School, Mr. Daljit Gujral-CEO Inscol Health, Mr. Balbir Singh, General Manager SIDBI.
The event started with fresh raw ideas on 23 October, in which more than 90 participants from all over Punjab were successful in making 16 good teams and develop some exceptionally good business ideas. On second, they prepared their business PPT with the help noted industry mentors introduced by SACC. These mentors, spent 2-4 hours with each team in helping build their business ideas and fine tune their pitches for the finals.
On day 3, each team practiced their tech checks of their presentations and they rehearsed their pitches in front of two senior officials and mentors from SACC Mr. Sumeer Walia-Director SACC (who has mentored over 150 startup aspirants, in last 3 years) and Mr. John Vestal from USA who is a-VP- networking engineering and architecture with pacnet and telstra, two world famous tech and telecom companies.
Both the officials took one to one pitching sessions, and critically examined and helped the flow of the pitches, its business sense, the MVP, the team coordination. With their help, the teams were seen more confident after gaining expert tips on further improving their business ideas.
In this program, various types of ideas have come forward from these 16 teams, some ideas are from: core engineering, from health care and innovation in health care, civic sense and hygiene, agriculture and organic farming, hyper local services, it and product development based ideas, finance and innovation in currency handling, glamour and bollywood and a lot many more..
The finals will be held at Indian School of Business Mohali on 29th October, from where, 3 winning teams will be chosen with top rating ideas according to their business viability, practicality and execution. The three winning teams will be rewarded free working space and bandwidth sponsored by startup in a box and stpi. the rest of the teams will keep getting regular mentoring from SACC for fine tuning their business ideas and startup plans.
The event is supported by Progressive Punjab as main sponsor, Netsmartz IIC as the technology partner of SACC, SFS as knowledge partner, One School, Inscol Health, STPI and SIDBI.
On the other hand, the buzz created by this event, returned over 500 positive tweets in just 2 days on event hashtag #swpunjab, as reported by the event facilitator, Vineet Khurana.