Model / Approach
The Pond-Deshpande Centre believes that coupling innovative new ideas with deep, relevant, contextual knowledge significantly increases the probability of creating sustainable, scalable high-impact enterprises.
For market-driven solutions, connecting innovators and new ideas to practical, real-world experts, that provide deep relevant domain knowledge, helps guide the idea to successful market adoption sooner. For efforts addressing social issues, partnering champions, who have a passionate understanding of a relevant social issue, with expertise in appropriate business and technology solutions helps accelerate the creation of scalable and sustainable solutions that have significant social impact. The Pond-Deshpande Centre helps encourage the building of entrepreneurial ecosystems that enable these connections between innovative ideas and relevant expertise. The Pond-Deshpande Centre supports many of these activities at universities as they provide the greatest potential for new ideas, represent a dynamic pool of youthful resources, and play a critical role in building the next generation of entrepreneurs and leaders.
Spreading the Entrepreneurial Mindset: To increase awareness and to strengthen knowledge and skills capacity for entrepreneurial and leadership development.
Convening and Networking: To nurture and facilitate ties between individuals and organizations and to showcase successful endeavours. This approach provides a new paradigm to accelerate innovation from idea to implementation by providing constant contextual feedback and by increasing the probability of creating solutions with significant social or market impact.
Community engagement: To increase sharing of information, good practices, and other resources; encourage mentoring, and to develop socially responsible leadership.
Growing Startups and Local Business: To help jumpstart projects where an investment might enable individuals and organizations to achieve critical milestones on their path towards self-sustainability and scalability.