Vineet Nayar, CEO, HCL Technologies

Tejpreet Singh Chopra, President and CEO, GE India

BW invited a jury with global exposure and experience to identify the potential big hitters of tomorrow. Tejpreet Singh Chopra, president and CEO of GE India, has global management and finance experience from his various roles with GE in France, England, Hong Kong, India and the US; Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies, has not only led HCL’s explosive growth, but also analysed and assessed several companies before acquiring UK-based Axon and a few others recently; R. Sivakumar, managing director-sales and marketing, Intel South Asia, is an Intel lifer and was earlier the worldwide director, business development for the Mobility Group comprising Intel’s laptop, cellular handset, WiFi and WiMAX businesses; and Murali Sivaraman, CEO of Philips Electronics India, has been country head for ICI in Singapore, China, Hong Kong and Canada.

The jury racked their brains for seven hours to pick the five most-promising young entrepreneurs from a list of 22. they screened the contenders on the basis of business model innovation, sustainability, quality of funding, management strength, relevance of entrepreneurs training and experience in business, and expected growth. To make the cut, an entrepreneur had to be picked by at least two judges.

At the end, eight contenders were left: Amit Aggarwal, Star Agri Warehousing & Collateral Management: While the jury acknowledged that Aggarwal’s enterprise met an important need in the agriculture sector, it lacked the ‘wow’ factor. They appreciated that it was modernising the crop purchase, consolidation and storage, quality certification and farmer financing services provided by traditional middlemen. But members wondered how Aggarwal would deliver his ‘end-to-end’ supply chain with just a few crores, when giants such as Reliance and Bharti were pumping in huge amounts.

N.N. Sreejith, Rural Opportunities Production Enterprise (ROPE ): This one got the jury really involved. While the idea of buying rural products from artisans for selling in Indian cities and abroad seemed mundane, Sreejith’s twist on it made it a compelling contender. He explained that ROPE is not merely hawking rural handicraft, rather it is getting things made from artisans using local natural materials based on designs and product attributes specified by the buyers. The jury appreciated the fact that ROPE has a designer from the National Institute of Design (NID) on board. Importantly, Sreejith is creating a network of sub-contractors for distributed manufacturing involving a large number of artisans, so that ROPE can deliver large volumes of customised products faster.