Guest Post: Mentors and entrepreneurs connect to move the Indian startup ecosystem forward

Bringing innovations to market, especially those tailored for low-income communities, requires the creation of a vibrant ecosystem that brings together entrepreneurs and leading business mentors, among others.

This ecosystem is required because while many early-stage enterprise catalysts have exceptional ideas or concepts, they often have limited technical expertise, business experience or networks to effectively bring their ideas to market. As a result, many potentially high-impact ventures fail to address the needs of low-income communities.

With this in mind, Ennovent, in partnership with Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)

, recently hosted an exclusive gathering of entrepreneurs and mentors to understand the challenges faced when creating or supporting high-impact ideas. As a result, Ennovent gained important insights regarding how enterprises can better achieve milestones through relevant and effective mentorship.

Perhaps surprisingly, entrepreneurs identified early on during the workshop that defining the role of a mentor within their organization is challenging.

“There is a difference between an advisor and a mentor. While an advisor may provide strategic guidance on a one-off basis, the mentor needs to have skin in the game, be subject matter experts and be committed to providing hands-on help to a startup”, said Rustam Sengupta, founder of Boond – an enterprise that sells rural survival kits to some of India’s poorest villagers – who attended the seminar.

While there are a growing number of business leaders in the evolving entrepreneurship ecosystem today that are able to offer guidance to entrepreneurs as advisors or in other related roles, it was identified that entrepreneurs often require a more structured level of engagement to be able to benefit from the mentorship process.

“Entrepreneurs don’t require mentors that come in and simply provide theoretical knowledge. What they need is for the mentor to be the pseudo-boss, an authority to report to,” noted Puneet Jhajharia, Senior Investment Officer at Grassroots Business Fund, an impact investment fund that also provides a wide range of business advisory services.

On the other hand, mentors identified the challenge that entrepreneurs often ‘don’t know what they don’t know’, so to speak, and are hence unable to access the help their enterprise may need. Therefore, it becomes important that mentors identify this knowledge gap to help render high impact ventures successful.

During the workshop the group also discussed how personal views may impact business decisions at an early stage, resulting at times, in clouded judgment and decision-making.

As a result, it is the mentor’s role to challenge the entrepreneur’s personal biases and basic assumptions about the market, customer base or the innovation design itself. Mentors can add the most value when they enable the entrepreneur to leverage their market experience to analyse business opportunities and challenges.

In creating or supporting an innovation for low-income markets, motivation is key above anything else. While entrepreneurs receive motivation from seeing their innovation’s impact, mentors are frequently excited to apply their specific experiences to foster new, and sometimes unexpected, positive changes for an early-stage impact-focused venture. However, at times, even this emotional return is not enough.

Rohit Luthra, Managing Partner at PVC Partners, a venture accelerator and partner for early-stage businesses added that, “Free services of a mentor are never valued. There should be some ‘skin in the game’ by the entrepreneur in the form of milestone-based sweat equity to ensure that the mentor can remain engaged and be linked to the growth of the enterprise in the long-term”.

Ennovent brought together entrepreneurs and mentors in the session and strengthened the belief that while an entrepreneur is the one that challenges the system, it is the mentor that enables him to structure the innovation and maximize its impact.

Within the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India and globally, Ennovent acts as a facilitator and brings together the various groups that are focused on accelerating innovations from concept to scale, especially innovations for sustainability in low-income markets.

Rather than making assumptions, it is through grassroots sessions such as these that the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and mentors can be understood and the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India be made more sustainable.

[This post was originally written by Perzen Patel, who works as a Communications Manager at Ennovent]