The Women Startup Programme, as it is called, aims to help women think of, create and initiate new ventures by providing them with early training, handholding through mentoring and incubation and support to the selected best projects. Initially launched as a pilot, it is entirely free of cost for all participants with the Wall Street financial services firm supporting the activities for a year. Speakers and mentors for the programme will include Goldman Sachs (India) Chairman Sonjoy Chatterjee as well as Bunty Bohra, Chief Executive of Goldman Sachs Services (India).
Though IIM-Bangalore’s NS Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL) has been offering a management programme for female entrepreneurs for the last decade, from 2011 it is allowing only those who have started a venture. “We felt there is a great need to start a new educational initiative to help women who would like to start up. When a possibility to do so arose, with support from Goldman Sachs, we designed this new programme,” said Professor Suresh Bhagavatula, Programme Director and Chairperson of NSRCEL.
The programme will be conducted in three stages, designed to develop both entrepreneurial as well as managerial skillsets. By leveraging social media, the Bschool hopes to get on board an initial 1,000 women for a five-week MOOC (massive open online course) to help them understand various aspects of entrepreneurship, including idea identification and valuation. The top 50 from the online course will come for a three-week classroom interaction that includes sessions for developing the business idea/developing a minimum viable product/mentoring.
Women will present their business ideas in the final stage where a selection panel will identify 10 ideas. These women would be offered incubation facility at NSRCEL, along with a monthly fellowship of Rs 40,000 for 12 months. Especially for the woman cohort, NSRCEL will be conducting a number of capability building workshops, mini demo days along with mentoring sessions. Besides regular NSRCEL mentors, Goldman Sachs’ senior leaders will also mentor and share their insights with the participants.
“This will include having our leaders speak at classroom training sessions, our employees work with the women to enhance their pitches for the competition, and also serving as judges to provide insightful feedback to help improve upon the entrepreneurs’ ideas,” said Chatterjee.
This impetus to woman entrepreneurship is especially relevant today given how dismally India fares in the context. India ranks a low 70 out of 77 countries covered in the 2015 female entrepreneurship index brought out by the Washington-based Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute.
“Women entrepreneurs go through a host of challenges, be it confidence, access to capital and good deals. Helping them through initiatives such as these is a very good idea,” said serial entrepreneur and investor Meena Ganesh.
“Goldman Sachs is focused on fostering economic growth and committed to providing woman entrepreneurs around the world with business and management education, mentoring and networking, and access to capital. In this effort, we seek to identify like-minded partners among the leading educational institutions in the world,” said Chatterjee.
In 2008, Goldman Sachs globally launched the 10,000 Women initiative to support the economic opportunity of investing in women. The 10,000 Women programme works with existing woman-owned businesses with annual revenue between Rs 60 lakh and 30 crore and a minimum of 10 employees. The main focus of the programme is to provide 120 hours of classroom instruction. To date, it has trained over 1,300 women entrepreneurs in 13 cities in India alone.
The association with IIM-B targets a different segment — women looking to become entrepreneurs. The programme is delivered online, in the classroom, and includes incubation.
Source: Economic Times