The Institute of Business Administration (IBA) on Wednesday organised a one-day workshop for the Fourth Annual IBA Business Plan - "Invent - The Nation-wide Entrepreneurial Challenge-2013" at IBA campus.
The business plan competition - "Invent" was launched by IBA, three years back. This year, the institute launched this trademark event with a series of workshops aimed at equipping the participants with the much-needed resources of motivation, mentorship and a first-hand experience with professionals from the industry.
According to the organisers, IBA will also hold one-day workshops in other major cities of Pakistan including Sukkur, Multan, Faisalabad, Lahore, Islamabad and Peshawar. The workshop was attended by students of different universities including University of Karachi, Institute of Business Management (IoBM), NED University of Engineering and Technology, Nust, Mehran Engineering University and others.
In his presentation, Imran Khan, Assistant Professor at IBA gave the students a brief introduction of entrepreneurship and innovation. While discussing the competing ideology of corporations and enterprises, he said entrepreneurship was not only making money but was also a spiritual exercise. "We should not promote consumerism but encourage prosperity," he advised.
Dr Zahir Ali Syed taught the participating students about making elevator pitch, value proposition & business plant penetration. He said that executive summary of business plan should not be more than two or three pages, adding that executive summary covered same topics a business plan had. "Write only short paragraph on each of the topics," he said.
Sharing the aspects needed to cover while making executive summary of business plan, he said: "Overview, market need, opportunity size, competition, our solutions, economic benefit, current or potential customers, business model, go to market strategy, risks mitigation, future milestone, financials and exit strategy are some of the key aspects that must be highlighted in executive summary."
While giving the guidelines to students for making elevator pitch, he asserted, "Elevator pitch should be comprehensive and concise, and it should be delivered in one minute." 'Invent' has four categories where participants register their idea in accordance with the relevance of the category's objectives. This year, four categories have been introduced namely; Techno-preneurship - an idea based upon technological innovation usually supported by scientific facts and figures; Social-preneurship - an idea based on societal welfare, improving the lives of the community members with no expected returns altogether; Agri-preneurship - an idea which is founded upon anything related to plants, for instance crops, shrubs, herbs; and Classic-preneruship - any idea that cannot be listed in any other category is automatically sifted to this category because of the diversity of its nature.