Re-Building the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in post COVID19 World

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India is an entrepreneurial country, but its entrepreneurs have had to struggle to create and grow their business ventures. There is, however, a growing group of first-generation Indian entrepreneurs – the founders of companies such as HCL, Cognizant, Infosys, Tatas, Bharti, and others – that have generated large scale employment and significant wealth. They and others such as Makemytrip, CLEducate, Indiamart, and Naukri have also demonstrated value creation through a public listing. India is home to 30 Unicorns (privately held companies with a valuation of $1b+). These successes have encouraged a new breed of entrepreneurs especially in the technology, technology-enabled, internet, and e-commerce domains.

India’s entrepreneurial growth can be accelerated by creating more conducive conditions – a catalytic environment, adequate capital flows (both debt and equity), support from businesses and society, and availability of appropriate skills, talent, and mentoring.

COVID-19 has posed to all countries, societies, start-ups, and individuals an unprecedented, extraordinary situation that has global repercussions on the economy and lives of several millions of people. Each founder is faced with making decisions that need to be immediate but at the same time thought through keeping in mind – health & safety of their employees, working from home, engaging with customers, looking at cash flow and burn, rejigging forecasts, setting expectations with their investors, fundraising, supply chain/logistics and above all their individual mental health and fortitude through these times.

Entrepreneurs, particularly, startups require more than financial resources to convert high-impact ideas into successful enterprises. In doing so, one of the biggest barriers is access to timely, quality, and tailored support in a flexible, yet structured, manner. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a severe impact on start-ups with many of these challenges becoming more pronounced than ever.

Objective: TiE Delhi-NCR in partnership with FCDO, Govt of UK aims to rebuild/strengthen the start-up ecosystem post the COVID 19 world. It aims to assist start-ups to respond to the challenge and scale-up in an inclusive, sustainable, and responsible manner.

Through a series of coordinated interventions, the partnership will focus on the following key pillars:

  1. Thought Leadership and Networking
  2. Mentoring and Capacity Building
  3. Fostering Innovation and learning
  4. Driving policy reform

The activities proposed under this partnership – e.g. hackathons, start-up mentorship and capacity building, policy advocacy will focus on enabling start-ups to cope and survive with the new challenge. In addition, the activities will also aim to create awareness and solutions to some of the long-faced challenges in the start-up industry – e.g. promoting women entrepreneurship, fostering innovation, and building more responsible and sustainable businesses.

The partnership aims to mobilize more investments in start-ups (including for women entrepreneurs), promote more inclusive and resilient business models; augment mentoring support, encourage markets in underserved geographies, and facilitate more enabling policies and regulations. It will identify sectors that have been more severely impacted, for focused deep dive support through the above pillars.

Current Initiatives

Scaleup Mentoring Program for Women Entrepreneurs

Women form an important segment of the labor force and the economic role-played by them cannot be isolated from the framework of development. The role of women as business owners is gradually increasing all over the world. Women Entrepreneurship is the key to Women Empowerment, Gender Balance, and alleviating economic marginalization of Women.

This program will create a suite of mentoring and learning sessions to educate and empower women from an entrepreneurial standpoint.

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TiE Startup School

Startup School – An online program supplemented by offline modules that will provide vital knowledge to develop hands-on skills to start a venture, scale a venture, and overcome challenges attached to it. This course will enhance the learning curve of founders and co-founders and accelerate their journey to success. It guides startups from Ideation to Validation, Business Model to Business Plan, Marketing Strategies, Team Building, Technology implementation, Funding and leads them to a path of learning with all the support they’ll need.

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Building an Inclusive Society - Leave No One Behind

No nation can be considered fully developed unless it addresses the needs and fulfills the aspirations of every segment of society. It is high time that proper focus was given to the untapped potential of people with special needs. The need to focus on the economic inclusion of differently-abled individuals is of immense interest to TiE Delhi-NCR.

TiE Delhi – NCR  and FCDO Govt of UK are collaborating to further their goals of an Inclusive Society. The aim is to bring the strength of both partners to create, nurture, and nourish the eco-system for People with Special Needs.

Key areas of focus will be Entrepreneurship and Market Access as well as policy initiatives that emerge as an outcome of this initiative.

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