It was in the first week of February that Jyoti Ramanathan made the big move. She left her software job at Hewlett- Packard. Lightly equipped, she moved into her new job at the small but ponderously named NS Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL), at the sprawling Indian Institute of Management (IIM) campus in Bangalore. The centre’s fl ip name is the ‘business incubator’. Such incubators exist elsewhere in the world. Their mission, or business, is to aid persons with new business ideas develop them into operative enterprises.

For Jyoti Ramanathan, her room at the centre would become the offi ce of her onewoman company, CraftMyGift, a customised gift start-up that she hopes to build into an e-commerce company. The chairperson of the centre, Kalyani Gandhi, is very excited about her newbie. “Her ideas are so different and scaleable (i.e., having potential for growth). Jyoti is so passionate,” she says. She cites in evidence examples of Ramanathan’s work. A particularly off-beat one is a Valentine gift ordered by a lady. It is a mock magazine made up to look like ‘Vogue’, displaying the lady on its cover. Inside, there are childhood pictures of lady and spouse.

Ramanathan’s fl edgling e-commerce enterprise – she intends to do business over the Internet – is just one of six being incubated at the centre currently. Not all the incubator babies are in technology. Wonder Grass, a company started by Vinay Kale, an architect, focuses on making construction materials out of bamboo. Wonder Grass organised a conference at the management school concerning the use of bamboo in construction, and invited architects, designers, public policy experts and government servants. “They came because it is an IIM Bangalore conference,” says Kale.