ISEED Announces the Winners of National Youth Ideas Challenge

GURGAON, India and NEW DELHI, December 19, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

- Top 3 Winning Teams From Delhi

- Over 7500 Students Across 500 Colleges Contributed 2800 Entrepreneurship Ideas to Benefit the Common Man in one of the Country's Largest Youth Ideas Contest

ISEED - International School of Entrepreneurship Education and Development - a unique educational institution offering India's first full time 1-year post-graduate level program in entrepreneurship, announced the winners of the largest National Youth Ideas Challenge, where over 7500 students across 500 colleges of the country participated with ideas that have the potential to benefit humanity by making the common man's life better, simpler and affordable. 

Out of the 2800 idea entries to the contest, the first prize of Rs. 1 lakh was bagged by Siddharth, Akshay and Abhay from NSIT Delhi for their innovative idea - LostBeatLive.com, a musical networking platform which aims at establishing an identity and creating a brand out of struggling musicians. The second prize of Rs. 60,000 was won by Omkara, a student from Miranda House, Delhi for her idea to manufacture self-watering transparent reservoir cum fabric planters for urban people. The third prize of Rs. 40,000 was given to team - Devesh, Akshay and Anubha from Bhararti Vidyapeeth Delhi for idea of a mobile application cum website for all major Smartphone OSs providing information related to the nearest clinics, hospitals, nursing homes, medical stores and blood banks alongwith single-tap phone call to doctors, ambulances, fire-services inan emergency.

Seeing the motivation among the students, ISEED also announced that it would be incubating through personal mentoring the top 8 ideas as well as some potentially good ideas from the top 50 entries to make them market ready over the next 6 months and then take them to angel investors for further funding.

Several leading entrepreneurs like Ajay Chaturvedi, Founder, HarVa; Kaushiki Jha, Founder, La Serendipity; Sambodhi Ghosh, Founder, Aakar Innovations; Jesse van de Zand, Founder, Janta Meals; Karan Singh, Founder, N-Sight Consulting and leading corporate representatives like Sunil Goyal, Founder, YourNest Angel Fund, Nitin Seth, MD, Fidelity India, D Yashovardhan, Co-founder, Ixigo; Dr. P K Goyal, Dean of GD Goenka Business School and others were also present to interact with the student finalists. Mr. Sameer Garde, MD, Samsung India was the chief guest on the occasion.

According to Mr. Sanjeeva Shivesh, CEO and Co-founder, ISEED, "We are very excited with the response from students and the quality of entrepreneurial ideas we've received from them. We believe that if India has to prosper, it has to create a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation by engaging with the youth. The ISEED National Youth Ideas Challenge with its objective to spark creativity, foster innovation and showcase inventions of college students from across India is a step forward in this direction." "Entrepreneurship education in our country has been largely undertaken as a token exercise in MBA colleges. We at ISEED are working actively with angel investors, entrepreneurs and industry experts to create a unique learning experience for students coupled with seed capital funding opportunities for in-house entrepreneurial opportunities as," he further added.

The jury present at the finals said, "We expected to see most ideas relating to internet and social platforms but the creativity of the students and diversity of ideas pleasantly surprised us. The ideas ranged from agricultural to medical field and some of them are highly beneficial for the common man. These students require a supportive framework to convert these ideas into real business ventures and we as industry have to come forward." Another jury at the event said, "I am really impressed to see a lot of student from very ordinary backgrounds reach to this level."

Students from reputed colleges from across the country like IITs, IIMs, NITs, St. Stephens College, Miranda House, IP College, SRCC, Sharda University, PEC University of Technology, Jaipur Engineering College, GD Goenka University, KIIT University, VIT University, MIT Pune and many others participated in the contest. The first stage involved submission of ideas by students individually or in teams in an Idea Box kept in their respective college premises. Out of all the ideas submitted the top 500 ideas were short-listed through interviews with the top 50 selected ideas making it to the final round of the Rapid Product/Service Proto-typing Round with presentations being made to a panel of experts comprising of entrepreneurs, innovators, investors, mentors and academia.

Recently, ISEED has also announced the results of the 2013 Indian Students Entrepreneurship Aspirations Survey (I-SEAS). The report presents the results of a nationwide survey across more than 50 cities to understand entrepreneurship aspirations in Indian students and a total of 1117 respondents were surveyed for the report. The survey results reveal that more than 87% students aspire to be entrepreneurs in life, though they list lack of entrepreneurship knowledge (30%), access to funds (28%) and mentors (22%) as the biggest obstacles to student entrepreneurship in India. In fact, 12% students are already entrepreneurs - doing some sort of internet business related to education, entertainment, mobile apps. The survey further reveals that Tier III city students are ahead of Tier II, Tier I and Metros in wanting to become an entrepreneur immediately after their studies. The propensity to take entrepreneurship within 5 years of studies is higher for Tier 2 students (72%) as compared to Tier 1 students (65%).

About ISEED

ISEED - International School of Entrepreneurship Education and Development located in Gurgaon is a unique educational institution offering India's first full time 1-year graduate level program in entrepreneurship. Founded by a group of professionals from institutes of national repute, ISEED's vision is to be a world-class educational hub offering a variety of long and short-term programs for budding entrepreneurs and startups at various stages of their journey.

Primary Media Contact: Pallavi Sharma, [email protected], 91-83-94901869

Secondary Media Contact: Rinu Jha, [email protected], 91-99-99687155