Entrepreneurship, which was once an alien word to the business students of Bangladesh, has now become a buzzword for them. But there is still a considerable knowledge chasm which prevents prospective student entrepreneurs from turning their dreams into reality. To turn young entrepreneurs dreams into reality and get a head start for their innovative startups, East West University Telecommunications Club (EWUTC) has come up with a unique platform, Entrepreneurship Summit 2018. Entrepreneurship Summit 2018 is a platform to enhance knowledge of both technology and business among the students.
Despite the name, Entrepreneurship Summit 2018 was not only confined to workshops and different sessions. Entrepreneurship Summit 2018 was a combination of both workshop and competition that helped the participants to increase their skills and abilities to think and incorporate ideas with a real-life scenario. The main highlight of this event was to develop plans on entrepreneurship among students and youngsters.
The whole event was divided into two days. It started on July 02, 2018. On the first day a grooming session on 'Entrepreneurship, business plan, and business proposal' took place which was conducted by Ashikur Rahman Rupok, a youth worker at Young Bangla. After that, the first round of draft pitching presentation competition took place. Eighteen teams from different universities took part in the competition. Out of them, eight teams were selected for the final round that took place on the second day.
On the second day, a grooming session was held on 'Final pitching and case study' with the selected participants. The participants were later given time to solve the case of the final round. After the allocated time, the teams presented their business pitches in front of the judges. After the final presentation, the workshop on 'Innovation and Entrepreneurship' was conducted by Didrik Strøhms, chief operations officer (COO), Ysi Global and Sumon Saha, country director at YSI, founder and president at Bangladesh Science Society. Here, Mr. Didrik shared his entrepreneurship journey and talked about how one should shape their business models and manage their startups.
After the inspiring session the prize giving ceremony took place where Team Panda and Troops from East West University (EWU) were announced champions, Duo Blancos also from East West University (EWU) were announced as first runner-up and Team Santa Banta from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) were announced as the second runner-up of final pitching and case study. The Entrepreneurship summit was a great learning experience for the participants. Mohosin Khan Towhid from The Champion Team, Team Panda and Troops shared his whole journey with us. According to Mohosin "It was a fantastic experience. The workshop was beneficial. We got the opportunity to learn a lot of technological innovation which is being used in current startups. We had a fantastic experience. The judge from the first round Mr Ashikur Rahman Rupok taught us a lot of new things which helped us to reshape our business model. Then the template given today was astonishing. We learned a lot of further analysis today from that. And lastly, the speech from Mr Didrik about his entrepreneurship journey and how we should shape our business models and manage our startups was inspiring."
Nabila Tabassum Jhilik, the general secretary at East West University Telecommunications Club, told us about the plans of EWUTC. In her words, "EWUTC is going to give the top five teams seed funding so that they can implement their ideas. EWUTC will also try to send the winning teams to Bangkok, Thailand on O-YES conference."
This kind of events can help the youths of our country to develop themselves. We hope to see more of this kind of events in the future.
The writer is a student of East West University and she can be reached [email protected]
