ISB’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) hosted the graduation ceremony of the 4th batch of Technology Entrepreneurship Programme (TEP) on July 2, 2019.
 

CIE collaborated with Andhra Pradesh Information Technology Academy (APITA) and Telangana Academy of Skill and Knowledge (TASK) to promote an entrepreneurial orientation among young engineering students across Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
 

As a result of this partnership, TEP, a two-year comprehensive semi-virtual programme, is conducted every year. TEP had around 3,500 students enrolling in the last five years and close to 1,000 students graduating in the last four batches across over 30 colleges.


 

This year, 330 students graduated from the fourth batch of TEP 2017-19. The graduation ceremony also had the top five student teams from across Andhra Pradesh (AP) and Telangana presenting their final prototype and business idea to a set of panellists. There were 124 graduates from AP and 206 graduates from Telangana.
 

Out of the top five teams, two were from Sasi Institute of Engineering and Technology and Ananthalakshmi Institute of Technology and Sciences from AP and three teams were from Telangana’s Mahindra Ecole Centrale, Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology and Sreenidhi Institute of Science and Technology.
 

The ideas featured various topics – from agritech solutions (such as cocoa cutting simplification) to smart cities (such as smart brushes for cleaning clothes and automobile driving enhancement). The ceremony ended in a high team with the students demonstrating their functional prototypes to a packed audience which had members from industry, academia and students.
 

The panellists evaluating the top teams were Jitendra Emmani – CEO and Co-founder at Picxy.com, Kamini Gupta – CEO at EdgeFX Technologies, Rakesh Munnanooru - CEO and Founder at Whistle Drive and Srini Chandupatla – start-up evangelist, serial entrepreneur and an angel investor.
 

Several dignitaries graced the ceremony and awarded the graduands. Some of them were Shrikant Sinha – CEO at TASK, Sailaja – Officer on Special Duty at TASK, Dr Radhakrishna – Officer on Special Duty at APITA, Professor Bhagwan Chowdhry, Professor Anand Nandkumar and Amrita Dutta – Associate Director of CIE at ISB.


 

With this, ISB’s CIE continues to foster a vibrant ecosystem for the creation and growth of enterprises through research, education and practice. The overarching objectives of the centre remain to create and disseminate research-based knowledge in the area of innovation and entrepreneurship, to contribute and promote entrepreneurial approaches to address socio-economic challenges of emerging markets and to support entrepreneurial creation and growth aspirations in key sectors.