MIT expert offers live in workshop for entrepreneurs

Kochi: It’s spring season for entrepreneurship and startups in Kerala. And the latest to bloom is a live-in workshop on entrepreneurship and innovation.

Rajesh M. Nair, visiting scholar in product development, commercialisation & entrepreneurship at the Tata Center of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is holding a one-week live-in workshop on innovation, fabrication and entrepreneurship at Chirayinkeezhu from December 21.

It will take place at his ancestral home which he has converted into an innovation home, complete with a small fablab.   
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The students will learn to develop products and business plans at the workshop,” Mr Nair said. “In the first two days, they will make a simple project and demonstrate it. T

hat done, they will be asked to identify local problems, come out with solutions and test them on the field.

The solutions or products they come up with should have a value: either they have a commercial value that people would be willing to pay for them, or they have a social value so that some else would pay.”

Mr Prashant Patil, research scholar with MIT and Mr Paul Anand, CEO of Biotz Intelligent Technologies, Thiruvananthapuram, will be part of the first workshop.

A similar workshop is going at IIT Bombay now. “We have 20 students attending it,” he said. Mr Nair plans to conduct such workshops every three months and enlist the services of more experts from the US and India.

The programme is not looking at minting instant entrepreneurs but to pass them through the processes an entrepreneur goes through so that they would start thinking about problems and have the confidence to come out with solutions, Mr Nair said. There will be follow up and mentoring of the business plans, he said.

“The first batch will be of 15 students and I have already got applications from various places in India,” he said. Students can apply at www.techtop.in