The E-cell of Indian Institute of Management Lucknow (IIM-L) Abhiyaan has launched an Entrepreneur Mentorship and Advisory center called Drona which aims at making starting a business easy for the Start-Up business man. Conceived almost three years ago at IIM-L, the center materialized in January of 2009 when second year MBA students got together under Prof. Abhishek Nirjar and set up the advisory board that will help would be businessmen to move forward. Its in its second phase now where it will provide the advisories expertise to people who need such an advice to materialize their business ideas.
What the center will do is bring on its board, industry experts, Professors and alumni from different areas like IT & ITES, Knowledge Management, Technology Advertising, Logistics, Telecommunications, Media, Energy, Agribusiness, Food Processing, Health Care, Retail, Internet, Financial Services and Human Resource Management and use their vast pool information to help entrepreneurs set up their ventures. They will be guided on raising finances, assessing market potential, marketing, driving operational excellence, assessing business risks or embracing business models. Some of the advisories who are already on board are Dr. Ashwani Kumar, Associate Prof. IIM-L, Mr. Shailesh Vikram Singh from 2I Ventures and Mr. Shankar from TE Ventures.
Future entrepreneurs who seek guidance from Drona will first have to present their idea to the committee members which consists of 12 members, six students from the second and six students from the first year of the MBA post graduate program at IIM-L. The committee will then, according to the business idea, refer them to the most appropriate member on the advisory board as their mentor. Multiple mentors will be provided for different areas such as finance, operations and marketing to balance the time that the advisories spend with Drona. If needed, the business plan will be broken in phases and mentors and specialist in a particular phase will guide the mentees. Drona will cover the whole of India and through it the mentor and mentees will be able to keep in touch with each other with the help of phone calls and emails.
The intention behind Drona is to provide helpful and usable information to all future entrepreneurs. It wants to expand to a level where it can help all different segments of the industry. With the rise in entrepreneurship, it seems to have come up at the right time. Hope it rises with the start-ups it will help rise.