The SME Toolkit is a invaluable resource for Indian startup entrepreneurs that I could have killed for three years ago (when I made the switch to being self employed). It is a project of IFC (part of the World Bank) and IBM. In India, ICICI Bank has tied up with IFC to offer business management & entrepreneurship related info to small & medium enterprises. This is a website that contains tons of resources to help entrepreneurs & business owners start, finance, formalize and grow their businesses- this ranges from info about accounting/finance, business planning, marketing/sales, operations to how-to articles, business forms, excel based templates et al. The diversity of the website’s content is quite amazing. Check out the business forms section – it contains scores of forms & templates (in doc/excel formats) that you can download, adapt or modify for your use. Ot its Tools section, which has various financial tools for business analysis.

I can vouch from my personal experience that such a resource can greatly lower the entry barriers to starting up on your own. When you doing initial planning for your business, you need easy access to info that can help you make important decisions about your future venture. Of course, once you decide to go ahead with it, you need to hire chartered accountants, lawyers, office managers etc but before you get to that stage, you need extraneous help to take decisions. This is all the more important for technology entrepreneurs, since they (usually) are techies (having little exposure to business planning, finance, legal frameworks etc) and they are probably fed on a diet of the ‘do-it-yourself’ culture.

Another great resource (covered previously on this blog) that first time entrepreneurs should check out is the website of NEN (National Entrepreneurship Network).

I was in Bangalore earlier this week to attend the (I3) ‘India is Innovation’ summit organized by Microsoft India to galvanise the innovation movement in the Indian technology industry. This was an extremely high profile event and had a host of prominent industry speakers as well as participants from the different constituents of the Microsoft ecosystem. The event was held over two days; day one had a VC panel discussion, apart from a dedicated showcase that featured ten selected tech startups making pitches to the VCs. Day Two was what I attended, and it featured a series of talks, panel discussions and a live televised talk show hosted by CNBC (snaps below vis slideshare).

Something that struck me during the event was the role organisations like Microsoft can play in being a catalyst for innovation in this country. Its customer base is diverse- it includes end consumers, technology companies, govt departments, academic institutions, corporate organisations et al., and hence the company can prove to be a natural unifier of sorts.

The session that left the deepest impression on me was the talk by Rediff’s founder Ajit Balakrishnan, with his narrative of how some of pathbreaking innovations have been positioned as “little less of something popular that already exists” (think of a motor vehicle as a horseless carriage or a news blog as a editorless website). A similar perspective on this issue came from Microsoft’s Dan’l Lewin, who remarked that most of the killer applications on the web today are simply “new ways of doing old things“.