(Bloomberg)

What a pity. Entrepreneurship writing and awards should actually celebrate new ventures and new businessmen. They should feature people who are betting their shirts on their ideas, people who are trying to create new businesses, often with few resources, but passionately convinced about the viability of their ideas. Entrepreneurship lists should be all about people who could end up creating whole new businesses and industries or those who could create firms that will change the existing rules of the industries they are getting into.

The problem with trying to follow that latter path, of course, is that it is so much easier to identify a winner after he has already won. When Infosys had become well-established, it was much easier to write about it. There was no risk involved in telling its story. It was also easier to write about Dhirubhai Ambani once he had made his initial millions, and was already on the way to becoming a success. It was easier to write about Raman Roy’s journey as an entrepreneur when he had established his company. It would have been immensely risky to try and write about any of them when their start-ups were two- or three-years old. One would have never known whether they would be in business five years hence.

The Selection Process
We started the exercise by contacting venture capital firms and angel investors, and asked them to nominate promising entrepreneurs they had funded. We also put up advertisements calling for entries in our magazine and on our website. We set a few criteria for applicants.

One, their companies needed to have survived two years at least. Too many start-ups die before they reach their second birthday, and we did not want to consider an idea that had not been tested for at least some time in the market.

Two, we kept the upper cap at five years. Our logic was that after five years, if the start-up was still facing teething troubles, it was probably not doing things the right way. The five-year cap was a subjective judgement, but we felt that the logic on which it was based was sound.

Finally, we said that people applying should either have started off with a brand new idea, or should have discovered a new niche within an existing market, or should have developed an idea which had the potential of turning upside down, the rules of the game in an established industry or market. In essence, we were looking for disruptive ideas.

We got a flood of entries though not all met the conditions we had set. Age of the entrepreneur and age of the start-up was much easier to meet than the criteria on the newness of the idea. Having said that, we did get some impressive entries from people who were pursuing old ideas but trying to do it better by refining the execution model.

The wonderful part of this exercise was that it showed us how there can be new ideas in practically every field. We got applications from hard- core technologists — and from people who had faith in the internet revolution. We also received entries from people focusing on the social sector, people who wanted to change rural economies, and people who just wanted to change the way you and I do our shopping or go about other activities in our daily lives.

Some of the ideas were utopian — and some were practical and pedestrian. There were some ideas that tugged at your emotions — but which your rational mind dismissed as being unscaleable or simply unsustainable in the long run. Then there were the highly prosaic ideas that were bound to make tons of money — but were simply not exciting enough. What was common, though, in each and every case was the absolute belief the entrepreneur had in his or her enterprise.

Separating The Wheat From The Chaff
At any rate, after the BW edit team had done a basic due diligence and short listing to cull out the pedestrian ideas, the really tough task was left to the jury — Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies; Tejpreet Singh Chopra, president and CEO of GE India; R. Sivakumar, managing director, sales and marketing, of Intel India; and Murali Sivaraman, CEO of Philips Electronics India. It was the task of this quartet to choose the five most promising entrepreneurs.

On a quiet Saturday morning, the redoubtable foursome met with the BW team, and sat down to choose the best ideas from the shortlist. They debated and deliberated on each case, and finally came up with their selection. It was a marathon process, fuelled by coffee, discussions on novelty of ideas, sustainability of business model and execution capabilities. In some cases, the jury called up the entrepreneurs and grilled them to test their conviction and logic. Read about how they convinced the jury make its final choices on page 60.

It was an exhilarating exercise, and one that we will repeat every year.

(Businessworld Issue Dated 24-30 March 2009)