The Story of Dr.Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (born 23 March 1953) is an Indian entrepreneur. She is the Chairman & Managing Director of Biocon Limited a biotechnology company based in Bangalore (Bengaluru), India. She started Biocon in 1978 and spearheaded its evolution from an industrial enzymes manufacturing company to a fully integrated bio-pharmaceutical company with a well-balanced business portfolio of products and a research focus on diabetes, oncology and auto-immune diseases. She also established two subsidiaries: Syngene to provide development support services for discovery research and Clinigene to cater to clinical development services.
Her pioneering work in the sector has earned her several awards, including the prestigious Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan from the government of India.She was recently named among TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. She is also on the Forbes list of the world’s 100 most powerful women, and the Financial Times’ top 50 women in business list.
Born in Bangalore, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw completed her schooling from the city’s Bishop Cotton Girl’s High School. She wanted to join medical school but instead took up biology and completed her BSc Zoology Honors course from Mount Carmel College,Bangalore University. She later did her post-graduation in Malting and Brewing from Ballarat College, Melbourne University.
She worked as a Trainee Brewer in Carlton and United Breweries, Melbourne and as a Trainee Malster at Barrett Brothers and Burston, Australia. She also worked for some time as a Technical Consultant at Jupiter Breweries Limited, Calcutta and as a Technical Manager at Standard Maltings Corporation, Baroda between 1975 and 1977. 

Today, thanks to her leadership, Biocon is building cutting-edge capabilities, global credibility and global scale in its manufacturing and marketing activities. It has Asia’s largest insulin and statin facilities also the largest perfusion-based antibody production facilities.

The Story of Anshu Gupta (Ashoka Fellow)

Popularly known as the Clothing Man, Anshu has done his Mass communications twice and masters in Economics. Starting as a freelance journalist, Anshu left a corporate job in 1998 and founded GOONJ with a mission to make clothing a matter of concern and to bring it among the list of subjects for the development sector. An Ashoka Fellow and the Global Ambassador of Ashoka, Anshu is creating a mass movement for recycling and reuse of tonnes of waste material by channelising it from the cities to the villages, as a resource for rural development. 

At IIMC Anshu was instantly in luck. His classmate was a vivacious girl, Meenakshi Trakroo. He wooed her, she responded and they married later. But that did not cause either of them to shut the door on the world and indulge themselves. They were both seeking a cause worth living for.

Anshu was freelancing for magazines even as a student. A series of experiences that didn't quite connect then, eventually led him and Meenakshi to commit themselves to their current mission.

When earthquakes shook Uttarkashi in 1991, Anshu went over with his camera. "Relief work was in full swing but it was not very sensitively done," he says. "The hill people are poor but they are proud. They were aghast at bundles of clothes dumped from moving trucks, literally on their heads. They withdrew and chose to wrap themselves in potato sacking cloth." Charity without dignity is an insult.

In Delhi's streets he once found a young man lie dead. There was an empty bottle of liquor and a full plate of uneaten food. "He died drinking to keep warm", whispered people who stood around. He had food to eat but not clothes to shield against the cold. Anshu met many young men who skipped job interviews because they did not have presentable clothes.

Listed in ‘Forbes’ as one of the India’s most powerful entrepreneurs, Anshu’s organization, GOONJ has won many prestigious awards including the Innovation for India award, Lien i3 challenge, CNN-IBN Real Hero’s Award, India NGO of the Year Award, Changemakers Innovation Awards and Development Market Place Award from the World Bank.

Anshu’s efforts to bring wider attention to the most ignored basic need of human i.e. clothing and its various aspects right from dignity, deaths in winters, to the most taboo subject of sanitary pads are getting wider acceptance across the world and many organizations have started replicating GOONJ’s various initiatives.

GOONJ is considered one of the leading social enterprises in India, the largest non monetary resource agency and people also call it one of the largest civic participation movements!!

Anshu is a passionate photographer and travels primarily to remote parts of the country to understand people, their behavior and need!

The Story of Amar Bose

Bose was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Noni Gopal Bose and an American mother. His father was a Indian and Bengali freedom revolutionary who, having been imprisoned for his political activities, fled Calcutta in the 1920s in order to avoid further prosecution by the British colonial police.

Bose first displayed his entrepreneurial skills and his interest in electronics at age thirteen when, during the World War II years, he enlisted school friends as co-workers in a small home business repairing model trains and home radios, to supplement his family's income^.

After graduating from Abington Senior High School in Abington, Pennsylvania, Bose enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating with an SB (Bachelor of Science) in Electrical Engineering in the early 1950s. Bose spent a year in Eindhoven, Netherlands, in the research labs at NV Philips Electronics; and a year as a Fulbright research student in New Delhi, India, where he met his future wife, whom he later divorced. He completed his PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT, writing a thesis on non-linear systems under the supervision of Norbert Wiener and Yuk-Wing Lee.

Following graduation, Bose became an Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During his early years as a professor, Bose bought a high-end stereo speaker system in 1956 and he was disappointed to find that speakers with impressive technical specifications failed to reproduce the realism of a live performance. This would eventually motivate his extensive speaker technology research, concentrating on key weaknesses in the high-end speaker systems available at the time. His research on acoustics led him to invent a stereo loudspeaker that would reproduce, in a domestic setting, the dominantly reflected sound field that characterizes the listening space of the audience in a concert hall. His focus on psychoacoustics later became a hallmark of his company's audio products.

For initial capital to fund his company in 1964, Bose turned to angel investors, including his MIT thesis advisor and professor, Dr. Y. W. Lee. Bose was awarded significant patents in two fields that continue to be important to the Bose Corporation. These patents were in the area of loud speaker design and non-linear, two-state modulated, Class-D, power processing. The company Bose founded now employs more than 9,000 people worldwide and produces products for home, car, and professional audio, as well as conducting basic research in acoustics and other fields. Bose never made his company public, and since the company was privately held Bose was able to pursue risky long-term research. In a 2004 interview in Popular Science magazine, he said: "I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by MBAs. But I never went into business to make money. I went into business so that I could do interesting things that hadn't been done before."

As company, Bose focused relentlessly on acoustic engineering innovation. His speakers, though expensive, earned a reputation for bringing concert-hall-quality audio into the home, the Times said.

Though his first speakers fell short of expectations, Bose kept at it. In 1968, he introduced the Bose 901 Direct/Reflecting speaker system, which became a best seller for more than 25 years and firmly entrenched Bose, based in Framingham, Massachusetts, as a leader in a highly competitive audio components marketplace.

Later inventions included the popular Bose Wave radio and the Bose noise-cancelling headphones, which were so effective that they were adopted by the military and commercial pilots, according to the Times.

Bose’s devotion to research was matched by his passion for teaching. Having earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s, Bose returned from a Fulbright scholarship at the National Physical Laboratory in New Delhi and joined the MIT faculty in 1956.

Amar Gopal Bose was born Nov 2, 1929, in Philadelphia. His father, Noni Gopal Bose, was a Bengali freedom fighter who was studying physics at Calcutta University when he was arrested and imprisoned for his opposition to British rule in India.

He escaped and fled to the US in 1920, where he married an American school teacher.

At age 13, Bose began repairing radio sets for pocket money for repair shops in Philadelphia. During World War II, when his father’s import business struggled, Bose’s electronics repairs helped support the family, the Times said.

Bose and his ex-wife, Prema, had two children, Vanu, now the head of his own company, Vanu Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Maya Bose, who survive him, as does his second wife, Ursula, and one grandchild.

In addition to running his company, Bose remained a professor at MIT until 2001. In 2011, Bose donated a majority of the company's non-voting shares to MIT on the condition that the shares never be sold.

Bose said that his best ideas usually come to him in a flash. "These innovations are not the result of rational thought; it's an intuitive idea." His son, Vanu Bose, is the founder and CEO of Vanu, Inc., a firm whose software-based radio technology provides a wireless infrastructure that enables individual base stations to simultaneously operate GSM, CDMA, and iDEN protocols for cellphone voice and data transmission.

The Story of Flipkart

From a start-up with an investment of just four lakhs rupees, Flipkart has grown into a $100 million-revenue online retail giant in just five years. The Flipkart story is not just about phenomenal success and mind numbing numbers but much more than that. It is about redefining customers' shopping experience.
Sachin and Binny Bansal found themselves stuck in boring tech jobs after graduating from IIT Delhi. Amazon.com, the world's largest online book retailer was the first chapter in their startup story. Inspired by Amazon they began flipkart.com in 2007. What started as an online book store with just Rs 4 lakh and 50,000 titles, today it is India's online megastore selling 17500 items everyday.
Sachin and Binny are now looking at grossing revenues of Rs 2500 crore this financial year that bear a question mark on sustainability and profitability and the kind of cash the venture will need to burn over the next few years.Today, as per Alexa traffic rankings, Flipkart is amongst the top 20 Indian Web sites and has been credited with being India's largest online bookseller with over 11 million titles on offer. The store started with selling books and in 2010 branched out to selling CDs, DVDs, mobile phones and accessories, cameras, computers, computer accessories and peripherals, and in 2011, pens & stationery, other electronic items such as home appliances, kitchen appliances, personal care gadgets, health care products etc. Further in 2012, Flipkart added A.C, air coolers, school supplies, office supplies, art supplies & life style products to its product portfolio. As of today, Flipkart employs more than 4,500 people.

Initially funded by the Bansals themselves with 400,000,Flipkart has raised funding from venture capital funds Accel India (US$1 million in 2009) and Tiger Global (US$10 million in 2010 and US$20 million in June 2011). Flipkart.com, on 24 August 2012 announced the completion of its 4th round of $150 million funding from MIH (part of Naspers Group) and ICONIQ Capital

Flipkart’s initial success can be pegged down to the experience of its founders, both of whom had worked with Amazon. They also successfully used word of mouth marketing and social media to get word out. But there are literally millions of retail websites. And not many have achieved even a fraction of the attention that Flipkart has. So what is it that makes Flipkart stand out? For one, they offer a huge range of titles (more than 7 million) which really sets them apart from the rest of the crowd.
But is simply offering so many titles enough? I don’t think so. I mean, how difficult is it for someone with deep pockets to simply replicate this? Not very. In fact, the Bansals started their venture with just Rs. 5 lakhs. So what does Flipkart have that makes its model so robust? An amazingly well-oiled warehousing and delivery system. This ensures that deliveries occur within promised times all over India. And with a business volume of nearly 2 lakh books every year, one can imagine how important logistics is to this business.
- See more at: http://mediapanther.co.in/marketing/the-flipkart-success-story/#sthash.449Bts37.dpuf

Flipkart’s initial success can be pegged down to the experience of its founders, both of whom had worked with Amazon. They also successfully used word of mouth marketing and social media to get word out. But there are literally millions of retail websites. And not many have achieved even a fraction of the attention that Flipkart has. So what is it that makes Flipkart stand out? For one, they offer a huge range of titles (more than 7 million) which really sets them apart from the rest of the crowd.
But is simply offering so many titles enough? I don’t think so. I mean, how difficult is it for someone with deep pockets to simply replicate this? Not very. In fact, the Bansals started their venture with just Rs. 5 lakhs. So what does Flipkart have that makes its model so robust? An amazingly well-oiled warehousing and delivery system. This ensures that deliveries occur within promised times all over India. And with a business volume of nearly 2 lakh books every year, one can imagine how important logistics is to this business.
- See more at: http://mediapanther.co.in/marketing/the-flipkart-success-story/#sthash.449Bts37.dpuf

Flipkart’s initial success can be pegged down to the experience of its founders, both of whom had worked with Amazon. They also successfully used word of mouth marketing and social media to get word out. But there are literally millions of retail websites. And not many have achieved even a fraction of the attention that Flipkart has. So what is it that makes Flipkart stand out? For one, they offer a huge range of titles (more than 7 million) which really sets them apart from the rest of the crowd.
But is simply offering so many titles enough? I don’t think so. I mean, how difficult is it for someone with deep pockets to simply replicate this? Not very. In fact, the Bansals started their venture with just Rs. 5 lakhs. So what does Flipkart have that makes its model so robust? An amazingly well-oiled warehousing and delivery system. This ensures that deliveries occur within promised times all over India. And with a business volume of nearly 2 lakh books every year, one can imagine how important logistics is to this business.
- See more at: http://mediapanther.co.in/marketing/the-flipkart-success-story/#sthash.449Bts37.dpuf

The Story of Dhirubhai Ambani

 

Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani (Dhirubhai Ambani) was born on 28 December 1932, at Chorwad, Junagadh (now the state of Gujarat, India) to Hirachand Gordhanbhai Ambani and Jamnaben in a Modh family of very moderate means.He was the second son of a school teacher.
Dhirubhai Ambani is said to have started his entrepreneurial career by selling "pakora" to pilgrims in Mount Girnar over the weekends. When he was 16 years old, he moved to Aden, Yemen. He worked with A. Besse & Co. for a salary of Rs.300. Two years later, A. Besse & Co. became the distributors for Shell products, and Dhirubhai was promoted to manage the company’s filling station at the port of Aden.
He was married to Kokilaben and had two sons, Mukesh Ambani and Anil Ambani and two daughters, Nina Kothari and Deepti Salgaocar.
In 1962, Dhirubhai returned to India and started the Reliance Commercial Corporation with a capital of Rs.15,000.00. The primary business of Reliance Commercial Corporation was to import polyester yarn and export spices.The first office of the Reliance Commercial Corporation was set up at the Narsinathan Street in Masjid Bunder. It was a 350 Sq. Ft. room with a telephone, one table and three chairs. Initially, they had two assistants to help them with their business. In 1965, Champaklal Damani and Dhirubhai Ambani ended their partnership and Dhirubhai started on his own. It is believed that both had different temperaments and a different take on how to conduct business. While Mr. Damani was a cautious trader and did not believe in building yarn inventories, Dhirubhai was a known risk taker and he considered that building inventories, anticipating a price rise, and making profits through that was good for growth.

During this period, Dhirubhai and his family used to stay in one bedroom apartment at the Jaihind Estate in Bhuleshwar, Mumbai. In 1968, he moved to an upmarket apartment at Altamount Road in South Mumbai. Ambani's net worth was estimated at about Rs.1 million by late 1960s.

Ambani's his great achievement was that he showed Indians what was possible. With no Oxford or Yale degree and no family capital, he achieved what the Elite "brown sahibs" of New Delhi could not: he built an ultramodern, profitable, global enterprise in India itself. What's more, he enlisted four million Indians, a generation weaned on nanny-state socialism, in an adventure in can-do capitalism, convincing them to load up on Reliance stock.

Still, Ambani seems destined to be remembered as a folk hero—an example of what a man from one of India's poor villages can accomplish with non-shrink ambition.