HYDERABAD: Aspiring women entrepreneurs can now hope to get business ideas shaped by The AWESUM Foundation, an incubation service for aspiring women entrepreneurs. The foundation was launched on Thursday by Dr RS Praveen Kumar, IPS, secretary, Telangana Social Welfare Residential Institutions Society.Srikanth Vinnakota, director of the foundation, said, “It has been established to support women who have business ideas, but lack support from society/parents/relatives/ecosystem. It has been observed that women face a lot of resistance and discouragement for pursuing their dreams. AWE stands for Aspiring Women Entrepreneurs. SUM stands for sigma which aggregates the strength of such women.”
Srikanth also said that the foundation identifies business ideas from women through structured ‘Business Ideation Festivals’. The first cohort has been created out of one long-drawn ideation camp and four projects were selected comprising seven women. Srikanth further said, “These projects are fully funded and incubated by The AWESUM Foundation. We are happy to announce that we have partnered with VREAP to mentor and handhold the aspiring women entrepreneurs with an overriding objective of transitioning from ‘business ideas’ to ‘business entities’. We thank TSWREIS for trusting us in this exercise.”
While advising the entrepreneurs , Dr Praveen Kumar said, “You may come up with radical and great products during your entrepreneurial journey but be simple, be secure and be careful. Try to find out the need of the people in the society and fill that gap with your great ideas. Forget your degrees and 99 percent marks. Care for what you are setting up in this real life of competitive world.”Yugandhar Dodda, founder, of VREAP (Volunteers for Rural Entrepreneurs Advancement Programme) stated “We have been instrumental in designing and executing the structured Business Ideation Festival across all the TSWRDCW colleges.”
“We are glad that we are the incubation partners for the first cohort of AWESUM Foundation. This programme from is a blessing for those aspiring women who otherwise have limited accesses to main stream incubation processes. This is beyond incubation, it’s an experiential journey for the aspiring women with ideas. These four teams are scheduled to undergo structured incubation programme to emerge as independent organisations in the next few months,” he added.