Experiencing the Journey of an Entrepreneur

Name of the Department: IIC Council
Date: 05thDecember 2020
Time and duration: 11.00 AM - 1.00 PM
Venue: Online
Resource Person with affiliation: Ms. Annie Theodore, Founder LOGOS Transformation
Topic on which activity was organised: Experiencing the Journey of an Entrepreneur
Number of Participants: 380 Faculty 10

Objective of the Workshop/Seminar/Activity: The objective of the session was to make the students aware about IIC, Social entrepreneurship, to apprise the participants with the scope of social entrepreneurship and to give the insights about the Journey of a Social Entrepreneur Ms. Annie Theodore who is the founder of LOGOS Transformation.

Overall Report of the activity: IISU Incubation Centre in coordination with Rotary Club Jaipur - Gurukul &Startup Cell of the University is organizing 4 sessions on “Social Entrepreneurship - Experiencing the Journey of an Entrepreneur”. This event was the second session, started with the basic introduction. After that, the session started with the basic introduction about IIC i.e., Institution’s Innovation Council.
Dr. Anju singh has explained that IIC has been designed to inculcate the innovative ideas and to bring more business awareness among the students. MHRD and Govt. of India have established MIC (MHRD’s Innovation Cell) to systematically foster the culture of Innovation amongst all the Higher Education Institutes. The main mandate of MIC is to encourage, inspire and nurture the young talent so they can bring their innovative ideas to the current or the future problem and to inspire them to convert those problems into business prototypes. Bringing the session forward I got to know that the major focus of IIC is to create a vibrant local innovation ecosystem, start-up supporting mechanism in HEIs, establish function ecosystem for scouting ideas and pre-incubation ideas and develop better cognitive ability for technological students.
After this, Dr. Anju singh told about the IIC which has been established in IIS University among various other Institutes. ISS has an incubation centre with Institution’s Innovation Council which have different cells working with the same sector bringing the innovative ideas, transforming those ideas and mentoring them at each level of their growing stage. Further discussion goes with the purpose of all these councils and cells which are to provide a platform to nurture innovative ideas, to provide training to develop and enhance skills, to give an exposure to inculcate the entrepreneur skills and to participate in activities conducted by MIC. Moving forward discussed the cells in IIC which are Incubation centre, Innovation activity cell, start-up activity cell, internship cell, IPR cell and chrysalis E-cell all these cells have certain goals and they also perform certain kind of activities related to their functional areas.
After the brief introduction of IIC the interactive session was started. Dr. Aditi R. Khandelwal welcomed Ms. Annie Theodore, founder and director of LOGOS Transformation. She leads the people’s engagement and creates media functions at LOGOS Transformation. It basically works in the field of skill training and content offering to clients. She is a professional in editorial and digital media work. Ms. Annie has experience of working with media houses at many positions like voice over work and dubbing artist. Ms. Annie takes sessions on mental wellness and health.
The interactive session started with the introduction of her story like why she chose to be a social entrepreneur. Ms. Annie told that since her school days she was very inclined towards social sector, meeting new people and helping people all around. Ms. Annie used to spend s lot of her time with people in mother Teresa’s home but she never thought that she will be working in a sector like this. She told that she and her husband thought of starting a training program for corporates and different sectors. Gradually they came to know that there are people and organizations in bulk that are already providing this kind of trainings so they thought of providing the training to such people who cannot afford these trainings for this they started the trainings for some organizations during the weekend. After some time, a couple contacted them to meet them in-person and the both of them were 90% disabled. The couple discussed the story of their disability with them like how much difficult this is to survive with your own family if you are disable. In many regions around the world it is a belief that people who are disable are somehow cursed like if they are disable it is a curse on them.
After knowing all this they did their first pilot training with British Council. They went to gave a motivational speech to the disable people and after seeing them they got to know that they have a lot of potential but because they are ignored, this was all going away in vain. After sometime they left their full-time job and started working with the people who are somehow disable to help them, encourage them and to motivate them for moving forward in life. Ms. Annie provided them employment in content writing and various other fields and they were so happy and joyful that finally they have something to do now. She always wanted to make a change in a particular backward sector to bring it forward and make the world a better place for them as well as it is for everyone.
Ms. Annie discussed about her business as well. The vision of the company is to be a champion for an inclusive society where there is equality of rights, opportunities and resources to shape growth and fulfilment in line for all those who desire it and I’ll surely say that it is really very motivating and inspirational. Ms. Annie discussed what the services are i.e., training and consultancy and content services in 12 different Indian languages.
Ms. Annie told that they did a case study about Jaipur rugs which is also an example social entrepreneurship. She displayed a video, the video basically talked about helping village people getting employment. It was an inspirational story for all us.
Ms. Annie discussed the value proposition of her start-up for customers and for person with disabilities which was like value for money a strong social cause, focus on quality of deliverables with timelines, dedicated, diligent and time bound workforce, location and language agnostic and many more which all the root of the business. They are converting non-working population into productive workforce which is a highly great example of social entrepreneurship. Lastly, I would like to conclude that the session was highly inspirational and knowledgeable. At the end there were a Q&A session in which students asked their question to Ms. Annie and their queries were resolved by Ms. Annie gracefully.

Outcome: From this social entrepreneurship webinar, which was highly inspirational, participants got to learn that how they can seek more knowledge about social entrepreneurship, how to analyze a social cause, how to implement the idea. Participants also got to know that if they want to start a social entrepreneurship with no financial support and how social entrepreneurship is different for NGO. In countries like India, there is a need for change and we as the young generation can bring that change and can make our nation a better place for everyone.