FirstDot powered by NEN, is India’s national mentoring and recognition platform for student startups. I was at FirstDot along with Kiruba, Pravin Sekhar, Narayanan, Soundarya, Karthikeyan Vijaykumar to do un-conference style sessions. Some notes from my session on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
We started with – What, Why and How of Innovation. We discussed Ideas and Innovation. We covered a variety of topics on why students should do startups, how to do innovation in colleges, how students can make money and a few other orthogonal topics.
What is innovation?
Implementation of an idea and creating value.
How do you start innovation?
Starting with some ideas and building upon them.
Whare are good Ideas?
There are no good or bad ideas. All ideas are good starting points.
Why Innovate?
The urge to improve, to solve problems, and for self-development
Where do ideas come from?
Fulfilling needs, meeting challenges, solving problems, incrementally improvements
Why should students try a startup?
To understand entrepreneurship by practicing it, for independence, for fun.
We finally ended up with the topic on how students can make money. Here are some ideas from students themselves:
- Teaching other (younger, high school students)
- Doing projects for seniors (this was something I did not expect at all)
- Creating niche online magazines (example given was a car magazine)
- Selling customized T-shirts
- Managing Events
- Online data entry
- Writing documentation
- Note taking (for students by students)
- Blogging
- Helping companies work on promotional activities (marketing help)
- Amazon Mechanical Turk (my addition)
- Create YouTube videos
- Create websites using WordPress
- Design screen casts
- Design services (logo, website templates and stuff)
- Write marketing content
–