Rana Daggubati, Mukesh Bansal headline IIT Madras' first online e-summit to drive innovation

Indian Institute of Technology Madras' Entrepreneurship Cell recently hosted its annual E-Summit from March 5 to 14. This was the sixth edition of the summit and for the first time, the event was held entirely online. 

The summit aimed to help young innovators through a series of lectures, competitions, workshops and fundraising events. It featured four conclaves such as the Youth conclave, Innovators conclave, Start-up conclave and Growth conclave.  

This year's theme was 'Sustain to Attain'. The summit received around 4000 registrations across the four conclaves. Hanushavardhini S, Marketing Head, E-Cell of IIT Madras said, "The Youth conclave was for people who are interested in entrepreneurship and want to explore it and we organised events which gave them a flavour of entrepreneurship. Innovators conclave is for those who have ideas already. We helped them validate and enter into the third sector which is the startup conclave, which is for established startups, where we had investment opportunities of upto Rs 10 crore and we also provided opportunities to showcase the start-ups. The fourth conclave was exclusively for workshops that focus on growth. In addition to all this, we also run a social campaign every year. This year's campaign was called Pankh. We focussed on MSMEs and helped them develop sustainable business models. We had a policy making competition which is a five-week mentorship process where students learn about the importance of policy making."

She added, "This was the first online e-summit. As it was online, we had a lot more freedom in curating diverse events and our speaker line-up as well. Even for the social campaign, we were able to gather MSMEs from across the country." 

The summit featured high profile speakers like actor Rana Daggubati, Mukesh Bansal, co-founder of Myntra and Deep Kalra, Founder of MakeMyTrip.