Comments
Collaborative culture has been the buzzword at workplaces with companies desperately trying to break silos between design departments, coders, marketers and so on to fuel innovation. Now it’s percolated down to colleges in Ahmedabad. Meet A-league - a social collaborative platform - conceived by IIM-Ahmedabad’s Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship that is bringing students from diverse streams and campuses of Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar together.
Among others design students from NID, fashion technology students from NIFT, marketing communication students from MICA, management students from IIM-A, coders from Dhirubhai Institute of Information and Communication Technology have come together on this platform to network and learn from each other. The idea is to create a lot of creative tension and fuel entrepreneurship.
One Campus
“It’s modeled on the One Campus initiative of some top US universities,” says Ashwini Joshi, VP Ecosystem Development at Centre of Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship. “Ahmedabad has some of the top institutions in the country and we wanted to bring these diverse campuses together to collaborate and learn.”
Last year a small step was made by bringing together students from different campuses over garba celebrations, musical nights and pizza parties to break the ice. This was soon stepped up by getting the A-leaguers to participate in ideothons and hackathons. As Joshi points out, to give a fillip to innovation and entrepreneurship silos need to be broken and disciplinary boundaries crossed. So at the ideothon, each team had to include students from different institutions, and pitch a business plan.
Gujarat Accelerator
The larger idea is that the A-league will emerge as a sourcing platform for accelerator programmes at CIIE. A regional focused Gujarat Accelerator has been set up at CIIE along with SAP Labs. For the first batch which passed out recently, there were 168 registrations, of which 20 were shortlisted and finally eight made the cut. The next batch will begin soon and Joshi hopes that by promoting it across A-league they will be able to pull in more applications this year. More colleges in the region are now being drafted into the A-league.
A-league’s motto is: “When talented meet more talented people some cool things are bound to happen.” Well, let’s see what cool new start up ideas come out of this talented league.
(The writer was recently in Ahmedabad at the invitation of SAP Labs)
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.