Workshop on ‘Ideation’
25.09.2019

A workshop on 'Ideation' was organized by IIS Institution's Innovation Council with its StartupCell on September 25, 2019 in collaboration with iStart Rajasthan, Jaipur for all the students of IISU. The keynote speaker invited for the same was Mr. Manoj Sharma, founder and CEO of Enerleaf Pvt. Ltd., former partner in RoboMicroBotix, consultant of iStart Rajasthan who is currently mentoring 17 startups in Jaipur. He also claims the ownership of two start-ups which he willingly handed over to someone else for further action.After a formal welcome to the event and the guest speaker, Dr. Ritu Jain, Coordinator, IIC, presented a token of gratitude to Mr. Sharma for consenting to enlighten the students on Ideation. Mr. Sharma took the stage to begin the workshop with an introduction to the flagship program of iStart Rajasthan and its salient features like infrastructure, mentoring facilities and special women entrepreneurship plans. He broke the ice by motivating the participants to introduce themselves and share whatever they know about Ideation or iStart Rajasthan or any other related concern. Further, through plenty of interesting examples, he elaborated the three basic requirements of Start-ups: skill, speed and scale. After a quick tea-break, Mr. Sharma talked about innovation and Problem Activationand engaged the listeners in the worksheets distributed to them to ensure they are learning the intended. He also discussed and answered some FAQs related to the topic of the sessions of the workshop. He exemplified women entrepreneurs like Shraddha Das to inspire the girls to break away the shackles and let the innovative aspect of them come forth. He then intricately explained the Hexagon Framework, Product Hypothesis Fit and the Design Thinking Model. The lecture moved onto a more engrossing session as the students brainstormed upon an innovation. They were givenworksheets to map their ideas which were evaluated randomly by the facilitator to make sure that the frameworks of initial ideal phase were clarified. Towards the later part of the workshop, through broader topics such as Customer Development and Scalability, SMART tool, Market Landscape Research and Media Spotter Matrix, he enlightened the students with the roadblocks that they may face. The determination and developmental process of a product and the different channels they may use to communicate with the consumers were also discussed at length. The students applauded the know-how provided by the speaker and had adequate take-away from the workshop. The session ended with a formal vote of thanks and distribution of certificates to the participants.