I decided to write more on technopreneurship.  Very few educational establishments offer courses on entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship and its different flavors should be groomed as a life style. I will write about grooming technopreneurship today.

Technopreneurship programs should be added as an integral part of the education offering an entrepreneurial culture by planting the seeds for new ventures, preparing entrepreneurs through technopreneurship education, and providing the infrastructure to perpetuate and support new start-ups and ventures. The program should integrate value chain of enterprise creation; one that encourages start-ups, tolerates failure and rewards well. The key essence in such technopreneurship programmes is creativity. Creativity is breaking the conventional mental blocks and playing with imagination and possibilities, leading to new and meaningful connections and outcomes while interacting with ideas, people and the environment. However creativity alone, without technoprenuer skills and competencies, is not viable to sustain a business in a digital, knowledge-based economy. You need an integrated collaborative approach in turning an idea into a viable sustainable business in a digital economy. An approach that encompasses the 5Cs strategy;

Culture: The need to nurture a culture of innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity.
Concept: Incubation concept of role-modeling, research and development, IP creation and Knowledge Acquisition.
Capability: Build capability through training and awareness programs, industrial attachment and provision of financial and support.
Collaboration: Foster multi-prong collaborations with local and international industry partners, tertiary institutions and other ICT technoprenuers and start-ups.
Connection: Build association with strategic Multi-National Corporations in ICT areas in order to facilitate the transfer of knowledge to local technoprenuers, and support structures.

So you have what it takes to be a Technoprenuer, roll up your sleeves and get started! And make things happen!

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Rajesh Shakya - Helping technopreneurs to excel and lead their life!

Technopreneur - a terminology, I have used in my blog tagline. Many readers asked me questions to explain that word.

Bill Gates! Microsoft! Steve Jobs! Apple! Sergey Brin and Larry Page! Google! Count the names of entrepreneurs who started Oracle! YouTube! Facebook!

Wonder what they are? Then you are not ready to be a technoprenuer! Add your name in queue.

If you have decided to add your name in the queue, I am sure, you have what it takes to be a technoprenuer.

A technoprenuer is an entrepreneur who is technology savvy, creative, innovative, dynamic, dares to be different and take the unexplored path, and very passionate about their work. They take challenges and strive to lead their life with greater success. They don’t fear to fail. They take failure as a learning experience, a stimulator to look things differently and stride for next challenge. Technoprenuers continuously go through an organic process of continual improvement and always try to redefine the dynamic digital economy.

Technology and entrepreneurial skills are driving many economies to prosperity. The most famous of them all is, Bill Gates, who makes Microsoft a household name all over the world. Steve Jobs - well known for his innovations. iPod - most carried gadget by young population. Look at the success of Google - brain child of Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Who don’t know Google?

Technopreneurship is not a product but a process of synthesis in engineering the future of a person, an organization, a nation and the world. In a digital, knowledge based society, strategic directions or decision-making processes will be demanding and complex. This requires tertiary level and professional development programs and training to produce strategic thinkers who will have the skills to succeed in a dynamically changing global environment. Traditional educational programs, however, lack the methodology to transform today’s students into creative, innovative, visionary global leaders who understand the importance of technopreneurship.

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Last year I read the bestseller by Jack Welch - Winning, which helped taking many bold decisions in my business and in my life.
That is one of the must read book by entrepreneurs and professional managers.
I remember, I had written in some of my articles about Winning. Winning is different for different person. When I am waiting for green light on cross roads, I often get stopped by street children selling two page newspapers. If they sell their quota at Rs. one per copy, they make their day. They WIN their day. Value of winning is different for everybody.

Yesterday I was watching a TV show “Indian Idol”- one of the most popular musical show in India. Participants are competing to win the fame of “the Indian Idol”. Shabana Azmi - one of the best actresses in India and intellectual celebrity was the guest judge. She expressed a very powerful message to the participants. “Play to win. If you play, play to win. You need a killer instinct to win.” Competition has reached at the stage, where a mediocre performance will eliminate any participant. Each performance should exceed the excellence. No chances of excuses. People don’t care about the past performances. Fans of the contesting singers are competing themselves betting to make their stars win.

This is a big lesson for the entrepreneurs as well. You single wrong move may bring you down to earth. If you are confident and want to win, play like a winner and put your killer instinct to win.

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“The difference between failure and success is doing a thing nearly right and doing a thing exactly right”
- Edward Simmons

Giving focus on details builds the foundation for the excellence and that leads to successful work habits. Its very important that you put the excellence into what you do. Success is inevitable if you are innovative, you care your customers, and you make sure that all staffs in your firm participate in achieving the goals set.

In any kind of business, as in our everyday life, only excellence can make the difference. What is excellence? How do you measure the excellence?
Excellence is the completeness that you don’t leave off the last mile; you deliver the service to your customers efficiently and effectively, you always strive to push the envelop and your customers are happy and loyal; your deliverables are accurate and appropriately scheduled, and you are fully responsible for the complete job you undertake. When you strive to achieve excellence in business, customers comes to you for your service, they are ready to wait until you are free to take up their jobs, they spread your wisdom of excellence to others. Excellence is one of the the basic essence of “word of
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When I speak on the topic of success or failure, one or two people from the audience always ask me whether I have ever failed? Everyone of us has a story in us. Yes, I have failed many times. In my first few public speakings, I hesitated to tell about my failures. I feared that people will not believe my stories. Every time I failed, I always tried to learn from that. Thats why, I did not lost my will to win when I failed. The willingness in us makes the difference. But the results are great! Results may not be in terms of business success. Results can be in terms of mistakes learned along the way.

Things don’t always work out the ways you want. You test your concept, analyze, plan, project, design, implement and start perfectly but still fail at some point. How you take your failures will have more importance than the actual failures themselves.

Complacency is stagnation and procrastination. Failure, you can learn from and use for further improvement whereas complacency shields you to see it as a mistake (even though it is).

Besides many failures, I have been visibly successful as well. Because of the overwhelming success, many times I felt some sort of complacency grooming inside me. There have been times in the past that complacency almost ruined my life. I had achieved significantly more than I ever dreamed of. But I knew about it myself and I even talked to colleagues about this. I knew, I had to learn the hard way to be a better coach for myself. I learned, complacency is much more dangerous and harmful than failure. Read my previous blog post on Inner Quest.
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I am a regular reader of Seth Godin. I just read his post - The moment, a few minutes ago. Only Seth Godin can so nicely catch such moments of importance and describe in simplicity. I like how he communicates his ideas.

When you are sitting right on the edge of something daring and scary and creative and powerful and perhaps wonderful… and you blink and take a step back.
That’s the moment. The moment between you and remarkable. Most people blink. Most people get stuck.
All the hard work and preparation and daring and luck is nothing compared with the ability to not blink.
-The Moment

Seth Godin talks about the last mile. We mostly miss guaranteed achievements, because we blink, we step back, we re-think, we don’t know how to step one more step, we fear to fail at the very last moment. We always leave the last mile.

If you finish the last mile, then you win and shine.

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In my last post- “What you need to become an entrepreneur?“, I discussed about the different forms of “capitals” essential for business venture. Today I am trying to put forward few other fundamental things that you should really understand for successful entrepreneurial venture.

Your every move is the deciding move. Every move makes impact on your result. Your first move should be even more important, on that move you decide where you are heading towards? So you should make a thoughtful, well-informed decision to succeed. When I look at the successful, failed or “growth trapped” businesses, in general, I see three success pillars that decide their fate.

Three Pillars for Successful Business Venture

Work with Right People

Follow the Customer demand

Control your Finance

You must start with right people with required skills, experience, attitude and drive. And another essential is that you must know the mystery of your business.

You may have many crazy ideas and may be you are extremely capable but if those ideas are not doable or not achievable in short length, you can not win so easily. You must produce or deliver something your target customers really want, its
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“How do you make changes?” - a million dollar question. Until you try to understand yourself, you can not make changes. There is another question comes with this? What you really want to change? What thing is really bad? Is that “bad thing” bad for now or ‘bad forever”? Is that “bad”, only bad for me or bad for others as well. You want to make changes, only for the sake of change or that really makes difference in your life, life of your family, friends or the people around you?

How do you want to lead your life? You need to understand, who you are first, what you are capable to do and what you can do in the best way? Choose the best of your capabilities and focus on that. Try to ignore others ( I know you can not completely ignore rest of the things.) If you can not lead your life, it’s sure that others will come into your way and they will lead your life. If you are not clear on something what you are doing, concentrate! Give some time! When you know what changes you are going to make, you will know how to make changes. I am sure, you will find many choices and you can make better decision.

I am tagging two of my favorites with this post:
Chris Garrett
David Rogers

Inner quest is the self-test. Test yourself first! It’s really exciting if you really do that.
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I came across a great article posted by Michael Lev-Ram in Business 2.0 in its latest issue. “Two centuries of contrarian thinkers” presented a comprehensive collection of contrarian thoughts of contrarian thinkers of recent two centuries.
Article started with the inspiring thought from Henry Ford: ‘Remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, and not with it.’ Really inspiring to young entrepreneurs to withstand and struggle against the challenges. Those who withstand the challenges, and lives through that, they win.

1. Cisco cashed from the insightful thought of Samuel Brannan (1819-1889) - ‘The real money’s in the shovels, not the gold.‘ Cisco sells the routers and switches for Internet backbone.

2. Aaron Montgomery Ward (1844-1913), who founded the world’s first mail-order business suggests to “Cut out the middleman” - thats how all successful online marketplaces like Amazon.com, eBay.com, alibaba.com and many others
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