Geared up for Innovation: StartUp Ashoka 2016

StartUp Ashoka was held on 4th and 5th of November at Ashoka University, spearheaded by the Centre for Entrepreneurship. This edition of the two-day event saw participation from 90 students. This year, the keynote speakers included Vicky Roy, renowned photograph who features in the Forbes 30 under 30 list, and Kanika Tekriwal, Co-founder and CEO of JetSetGo Aviation. The organisers of the event aimed to design and execute the agenda in a way that was collaboration-centric, requiring participants to develop skills of team- building and coordination through a variety of different tasks, with the objective of introducing students to the concept of “Starting Up”. The winners this year, was the team of Playmate, a one-stop application for users’ desires to go out and play a sport they want to, whenever they want. Additionally, the platform also offers the opportunity for novice players and coaches to arrange training sessions.

The first runners-up was the team of Hurray, a student-run gifting platform and personalisation initiative, tasked with the mission of helping those with their special needs. The second runners-up of the event was the team of Motiv8, an organisation which aims at establishing a mentor- mentee relationship with socially backward children. The mentors will be working class professionals above the age of 23. The teams received cash prizes of Rs.10,000; Rs.5000 and Rs.3000 respectively and will receive one-on-one mentorship to kickstart their startup ideas. The list of mentors for the event included start-up expert Amit Mishra, Sarandeep Singh from WEE Foundation, Smita Mishra from Pool Wallet, Neeraj Mehta from immunify.me and Shikha Suman from Medimojo.