National convention 2019

National Convention on Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: Convergence at the Grassroots

About the convention

An important aspect of IRMA’s Incubator ISEED is to create a vibrant social entrepreneurial ecosystem. Every year we build a conversational stakeholder workshop to bring together not just our social enterprise and ecosystem partners but other co-travelers who share our vision and values towards shaping and strengthening the ecosystem. The National Convention is a way for ISEED and its partners to share their work and build collaborations.

The theme of this year’s National Convention held on 9th March was the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem. ISEED IRMA was a regional partner of the National Entrepreneurship Awards 2018 that had a specific focus on grassroots entrepreneurship and the event enabled ISEED to reach out pro-actively to entrepreneurs in Gujarat and Rajasthan, some of whom ended up winning the National Award. We felicitated them and also listened to their stories along with other regional and national partners on ways to strengthen the entrepreneurial ecosystem and what could incubators do with both the award winners and many others who were shortlisted.

A compendium of cases of entrepreneurship in the region was also released at the event. Ideas around on how we could enable greater convergence between rural and social innovations (our focus at the incubator and of DST) with rural livelihoods, entrepreneurship and skilling at the grassroots drove the conversations. We tried to address the requirement for greater training content and outreach in the vernacular to and for grassroots entrepreneurs. Participants at the workshop included entrepreneurs of the region, incubators (both early stage and accelerators), social enterprises; representatives from the Government (Departments of S&T, Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Industries and Rural and tribal development), civil society organizations and academic institutions.

Workshop resources

Concept note

Schedule

Spread over a day and five sessions with over 20 different speakers, the national convention saw a rich set of discussions on the entrepreneurial ecosystem and convergence at grassroots. This section provides a glimpse into the speaker profiles and the ideas that they shared during the workshop.