Beginning her lecture with verses which spoke of a certain stubborn and negative minded Sam, Ms. Parkin had the audience with her in the very first minute. Ms Parkin is the Executive Director of the Wadhwani Foundation, where she leads the foundation’s investments in non-profit programs. The overarching mission of the foundation is to create more economic opportunities for individuals in India. The foundation works in two areas: developing business entrepreneurs and helping the disabled build livelihoods or achieve gainful employment.
She is also the Executive Director and co-founder of the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN), the foundation’s key program. NEN is a leading catalyst which launches next generation entrepreneurs in India. Since its inception in 2002, Laura and the NEN team have built NEN to include over 200 top tier institutes, including SPJIMR, across 26 cities. NEN is helping develop a pool of over 300 entrepreneurship faculty members, and reaches over 200,000 students.
In her address Laura spoke about the characteristics of a good entrepreneur – excellent people skills, risk taking ability, optimism, creativity, negotiation, strong conviction and a clear vision. A keen ability to ‘think out of the box’ is also important. She said that a budding entrepreneur must know his customer segment well – their tastes, traits and abilities.
She then talked about NEN and described their various activities. NEN currently has plans of expanding into the international domain and is working on key catalyst programs that will help achieve this goal.
She concluded by quoting Prof. Howard Stevenson of the Harvard Business School - “Entrepreneurs pursue opportunities regardless of the resources they currently control”.
Reciting the ‘Sam-I-am’ lines along with the students, Ms. Parkin left the audi resounding with positive notes.
Cheers,
Manisha
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