Recently some team members in IIT Madras' e-cell suggested that we start an online share trading platform. Might get us back on track with events.
It used to surprise me in my second year that not a single e-cell in India actually focuses on product development. Including the e-cells of all the IITs. Most of us have got into the rut of business plan competitions and then almost every year somebody (these-a-days more than some) comes ahead with the above idea.
Sure most of us might feel that entrepreneurship is very MBAish and since we often talk about funding and investors hence commodities trading and futures are the next logical extensions.
They really are not.
Entrepreneurship is about the thrill of starting a new company. Identifying a problem, an opportunity and then working towards solving it. And it's not all social either. Most of the companies are indeed aimed towards generating more revenues. And that is what a e-cell should try and work on. Any event which focuses on idea generation, product development, market analysis, customer identification, selling (read: selling your product. not derivatives), structuring a young company, expansion, bootstrapping etc. should be encouraged.
All of the above points involve you as an entrepreneur sweating it out for something you made or believed in. Not living of somebody else's work.
I do not personally have anything against share trading and some such. It is required that you understand it if you are investing in the market. Hell today one would be stupid to not spend some time learning that. But, that it not what entrepreneurship is about. We should not be educating institute students about something which has no relation with them being entrepreneurial. In fact a person who does not believe in creating something and rather enjoys building money from money should ideally never opt to become an entrepreneur.
I ideally should not be talking about this, since I am still no entrepreneur. But hearing the same stuff year after year, I wanted to put my thoughts down. And most of the actual entrepreneurs are way too busy to write down about such mundane stuff anyways :)
Let's leave such interesting events and initiatives for more interested orgs in our institutes, shall we?
Ah.. I hate to be the first commentor and leave a totally negative one too. I absolutely dont agree to your point and this one seems to be a pure grudge against stock market. Trading is a beautiful phenomenon and requires quite a lot of understanding, temprament and strategy and forgot to mention, lotta math clubbed with an industry knowledge and insight.
ReplyDeleteComing to a trading platform as an entrepreneurial idea, there is "definitely" a gap over there and the guy suggesting this idea seriously will have to work out ways to get information, at nanosecond speeds, from BSE for the benefit of its users. Portfolio management and automated trading will become the hottest business ideas in coming times in India.
Read more about this stuff, who knows you might fall in love with it too :)
Nice post, after a pretty long time, esp. Entrepreneurship is about creating something new.. ofc if u come up with a diff strategy to trade n make money and offer it to prospective investors, that def is entrepreneurship (since its not diff from any other product/service).. But, its true tht most E-Cells started trading games to attract crowds, not to mention the whole confusion between entrepreneurship being highly related to finance/capital markets. The start-up ecosystem definitely needs eager investors and later, efficient markets for initial investors to be able to exit their positions, but thats just one part of the supporting system. The core remains the strength of the novel product/ service offering.
ReplyDelete@ Tarun:interesting template,although it dwarfs the main body big time..