The IBA Centre for Entrepreneurial Development (CED), along with the IBA Entrepreneurship Society, recently launched its upcoming Business Plan Competition "INVENT-The Entrepreneurial Challenge". The purpose of the exercise, as cited by Director CED, Zafar Siddiqui, is to promote entrepreneurship as an attractive option for the students.
He said that there is a need for graduating students to seriously explore the option of starting their own businesses in addition to look for corporate jobs. INVENT (for details visit: http://invent.iba.edu.pk/), which is a unique and revolutionary Business Plan competition, in its pilot year has 15 participating universities with 5 universities each from Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. The response from the student has been tremendous with over 600 student enrolled for the programme from the three cities.
In this regard, an introductory session, using Video Conference (VC) facilities, was organised on March 18th. This was attended by around 500 students, across three cities - Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad at eight VC facilities including the IBA City Campus, NED, HEC Karachi, FAST Karachi, FAST Lahore, NCA, UET Lahore and NUST Islamabad.
INVENT aims to build the next generations of entrepreneurs, enhance inter university and industry-academia collaboration. In this connection teams will be multi-university and multi-disciplinary (business, engineering, science, arts students working together in each team) and industry would be fully involved in mentoring and coaching the teams.
The programme would be intense and would run form March to July 2010. The finalists will be showcased and judged by industry experts in a conference in July 2010. The winning teams and teams that reach later stages of the competition would be given awards, with the winner, first and second runner-up teams getting Rs 500,000, Rs 300,000 and Rs 250,000 respectively.-PR
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