It is good news for wannabe entrepreneurs in the state.
With the entrepreneurship culture slowly catching up in the state and the start-up cloud becoming more visible, organisations are coming forward to lend a helping hand enterprising youngsters who want to create jobs.
In a novel initiative, the Kerala chapter of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), has started a business mentoring service (BMS) to micro, small and medium enterprises and start-ups.
The business mentoring service facility was launched in November and the CII-Kerala has selected 10 companies including start-ups for mentoring. The organisation is planning to expand this facility in the coming years. CII-Kerala Chairman C J George said that the mentoring service is the first of its kind in the state.
“Under the innovative new programme, CII would engage with the company by studying the activity of the enterprise in detail. We would provide advice to the company mainly to increase the productivity of the entity. Though we started the project with a total of 10 companies, the number will go up in the future,” he said.
The state of Kerala has set an ambitious target of at least 3,000 new companies by 2020. The Startup Village in Kalamassery aims to incubate 1,000 product start ups over 10 years in search for a billion dollar company from a college campus by turn of this decade.
Experts in the field point out that initiatives like this by the Confederation of Indian Industry would encourage more people, especially youngsters, to visualise and nurture their dreams to become successful entrepreneurs.
“The Business Mentoring Service is a good initiative and it will provide budding entrepreneurs with novel ideas to scale up an enterprise and build a successful platform for the future,” said Shyam Srinivasan, CII-Kerala Vice Chairman and Federal Bank Managing Director.