HeadStart Network and NEN Partner for Entrepreneurship Week India 2010

Theme “India: Opportunities Within” to focus attention among youth on entrepreneurial opportunities in solving India’s biggest challenges

HeadStart Foundation, has partnered with the National Entrepreneurship Network for Entrepreneurship Week India 2010. To be celebrated from February 6 to 13, E Week India is the country’s largest campaign to build awareness and support for entrepreneurship. The campaign connects lakhs of participants through a range of activities and programs to harness their potential as leaders and innovators. It is supported by the Wadhwani Foundation and run by the National Entrepreneurship Network, representing more than 500 member academic institutes and 400 plus NEN student entrepreneurship Cells (E Cells) across 30 cities.

This year’s E Week is set to be the biggest yet, engaging over 400,000 participants and featuring 4000 events in 30 cities.  Along with HeadStart, E Week will see the active involvement of more than 30 organizations that support entrepreneurship; corporate houses; business leaders; industry experts; non-profit leaders and faculty leaders to inspire, encourage and mentor participants.

Especially significant is this year’s E Week theme “India: Opportunities Within”. India faces daunting challenges across many sectors: water, healthcare, energy, education, waste management, transportation and more. As pressure mounts and the cost of technology drops, these challenges provide enormous economic opportunities.  This year’s E Week theme focuses attention of the next generation of entrepreneurs on these often-overlooked opportunities.

During E Week, participants on and off campuses across the country – students, parents, friends and key members of the community – will take the E Week Pledge and engage in thousands of events focused on the E Week theme. These include competitions, expositions, educational movies screenings, leadership and motivation talks with successful entrepreneurs, panel discussions, business plan and skills-building workshops, tech bazaars, awareness campaigns and more. In addition, participants can register on the E Week website to share their experiences and connect to the larger NEN community.

E Week India will culminate on February 13, 2010 with a gala Awards Ceremony in Bangalore.  NEN member academic institutes will be chosen for the E Week India 2010 Championship Awards as well as 2 Special Awards: 1) Nilima Rovshen Creativity and Innovation Award 2) Most Effective Public Awareness Campaign Award. Student representatives of the Award winners will be flown to Bangalore for the Awards Ceremony attended by students from various institutes, eminent people from the industry and the government.

About NEN

The non-profit National Entrepreneurship Network was established in 2003 with a mission to create and support high-growth entrepreneurs, driving job-creation and economic growth.
Today, NEN represents the largest, most vibrant community of India’s new and future entrepreneurs. Its membership comprises:

• More than 500 top-tier academic institutes across India,
• A motivated pool of over 1100 entrepreneurship faculty members,
• Over 380 student Entrepreneurship Cells that count more than 70,000 members, and
• Thousands of NEN Alumni, now coming together to launch NEN E Clubs
• Leveraging the resources and programs of the NEN Trust, these members – the NEN institutes, faculty, E Cells, and E Clubs – each year run thousands of programs that create and support entrepreneurs.
• NEN was initiated by the Wadhwani Foundation, and co-founded by IIT Bombay; IIM Ahmedabad; BITS, Pilani; SP Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai; and the Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology, Bangalore.