My Immersion Project Experience for Entrepreneurship Development course by Dr. Mandi -
I am Siddharth Golechha, a first year student of Post Graduate Diploma in Industrial Management at NITIE, Mumbai. I have taken an elective course called Entrepreneurship Development. I see myself as a creative person and seek ways to create new things, find new ways of doing existing things. It gives me a sense of satisfaction, thrill and adventure to do something unknown or to create something. It is with this desire of creating something new, creating value for the society, I want to become an entrepreneur. This is the main motivation for me to join this course.
Our professor for this course, Dr. T Prasad (affectionately known as Dr. Mandi) uses unconventional methods of teaching. I really like this approach as I learn better and faster by doing or by unconventional ways. For this course, the students had to undergo an immersion project which required us to procure rhomboid plastic sheets from a vendor which when assembled, generates beautiful designs and sell these rhomboid sheets to people on the street.
This taught us how an entrepreneur works right from the stage of getting raw materials and process them and finally make it available for the end consumer. The selling experience was a first for me and a mind opening one too. I thoroughly enjoyed undertaking this exercise.
I could not go with my batchmates for the immersion project to Kala Ghoda Arts Festival because of my medical condition. I had injured my knee and had to undergo a surgery just before the immersion was planned. And therefore, my immersion project experience is a little different from them. Having missed this golden chance of learning with my friends, I decided to do the immersion project on my own. I spoke with many batchmates about their strategies and their experiences of the immersion project. They told me several stories (which they have mentioned in their experiences) which instilled a sense of wonder, adventure and curiousity in me.
Never having done anything similar like this before, or never done a sale in my life earlier, I was also nervous and skeptical about how I would manage to do this. More than anything, it was my own mental block that I had to overcome. Feelings of shyness, embarrassment to approach strangers and doubts about my own confidence started engulfing me even before I could actually go out to make sales.
But determined as I was, I thought to myself, what I always think at such times, when I am afraid of something, that the only way to overcome fear is to face it. I started thinking and making strategies of what people I should approach and who would be attracted to the product (rhomboids) I was selling. The rhomboids are an excellent way to express creativity and the only limitation to the kinds of designs that one can make out of these simple plastic screens is his own imagination.
As a design enthusiast myself, I began thinking what people would be interested in expressing creativity through designs. I have a few friends in fashion apparel designing and I thought fasshion designing students could be a possible audience for my products. So, one a weekday, I took a bagfull of rhomboids and went to SNDT University Juhu and waited outside the campus to spot some students. I saw a few girls entering the campus at around noon. I introduced myself to them and asked them if they are apparel designing students. Fortunately, they indeed were design students. I showed them some rhomboid structures which I created for demonstration. I did not ask them to buy the rhomboids but instead I asked them to create a few simple ones on their own and offered them help for the same. The girls looked interested in this exercise and tried their hands at some simple designs. I asked them if this could somehow inspire them in their apparel designing and if they could make a prototype with the rhomboid pieces at first and then tranlate it into an apparel design. They said they have an exercise on creating apparels from unconventional materials like this and expressed interest in these designs. I asked them whether they would like to buy these pieces. I was happy when they bought 3 packs of rhomboid pieces from me and even more amazed when I could sell to these girl without any bargaining from their side!
This exercise taught me a few things which I would like to cite as follows -
1) One should get as many customer insights as possible to sell better.
2) A push strategy will not work in such products, one has to create that environment through effective publicity and marketing and demonstrations that the consumer themselves ask for the product.
3) On a personal front, I felt like a winner on stepping out of my comfort zone and actually sell products. It encouraged me to be more outgoing and boosted my self-confidence.
Watch me speak on my immersion project experience here.
Siddharth Golechha PGDIM - 19, Roll Number 158, NITIE Mumbai
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