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.