Welcome to NICE Conversations where we feature entrepreneurs and industry experts. We hear their stories, have them share their learnings and benefit from their insights. Featuring here Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula, Entrepreneurship, IIM Bangalore. It’s all about entrepreneurship: mentors, women, cultural and more!
Teaching Entrepreneurship
Prof. Bhagavatula is passionate about teaching and researching entrepreneurship in low, high tech industries and rural livelihoods. His research is also in the associated domain of social network analysis, where he is focused on the influence of social capital on the performance of entrepreneurs and teams. He chaired the NS Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL) at IIMB, one of India’s oldest incubators, till 2019. He was one of the co-founders of the organization HeadStart, which runs a monthly event called Startup Saturday. The event enables interactions among like-minded groups of fellow entrepreneurs and startup enthusiasts.
His interest in entrepreneurship evolved from helping women entrepreneurs set up micro-ventures in Kenya while pursuing his Masters from University of Flensburg, Germany. He has a PhD from Vrije Universiteit, The Netherlands.
Insights for Cultural Entrepreneurs
His own involvement with experiential tourism and his research in the handloom industry have valuable insights for cultural entrepreneurs.
“By nature, humans are curious,” he observes when elaborating on how he thinks the tourism sector will open up after Covid-19. “We have flirted with danger for quite some time. We have taken a pause and people are flirting with danger once again. I feel it is going to get to be a normal world .. not immediately. By 2022, there should be elements of how we used to do or variants of it.” He says the time is ripe to think of technology-enabled experiences.
Watch the clips to know more. Learn from Prof. Bhagavatula’s experiences. He speaks from his knowledge of interacting with different types of entrepreneurs since 2007.
