Intel Startup Program, Indian School of Business Launch 'Growth Tunes—a Leadership Series' for High-Impact Startups The invite-only series covers knowledge-driven talks by gurus, interactive workshops in collaboration with leading universities, and much more

The Intel Startup Program in collaboration with the Indian School of Business (ISB), under the aegis of the Emerging TechnologyCentre (ETC), on June 30 launched 'Growth Tunes – A Leadership Series', an exclusive offering designed for the startup ecosystem and leaders in high-impact startups.

The Intel Startup Program is the flagship program of Intel India, the Indian arm of global technology giant Intel Corp., to engage with technology startups, especially in the deep-tech ecosystem, who have intellectual property or innovative solutions that have the potential to create impact on customers and align with Intel's focus areas.

A unique initiative based on a corporate-academia partnership, the Growth Tunes series will encompass several opportunities to engage with an exclusive set of industry 'gurus' to leverage their insights and build the growth journey and overcome challenges to scale in terms of technology as well as business. The offering will comprise a series of knowledge-driven talks, interactive workshops in collaboration with leading universities, and much more.

"Growth Tunes is the first of the many initiatives of the ISB-Intel India partnered Emerging Technology Centre fashioned to strengthen startups' understanding of business challenges and acquire actionable insights to transform the challenges into growth opportunities," said Rajendra Srivastava, Novartis Professor of Marketing Strategy and Innovation, Indian School of Business. ISB, one of Asia's leading B-schools, offers various post graduate programs in Management and Executive Education.

"The Intel Startup Program is a wonderful attempt to nurture growth and leadership in innovative startups looking to carve out their space in the fiercely competitive ecosystem," added Srivastava, who is also the Executive Director at the Centre for Business Innovation and for the Executive Fellows Programme in Management, Indian School of Business.

Participation in Growth Tunes is by invitation only for a limited audience of high-potential startups and their founders as well as key leaders, faculty members across startups affiliated with the Intel Startup Program and ISB. Select members from the broader Indian startup ecosystem, including VCs and investors, will also participate in the series.

"At Intel, we strongly believe that we need the best of the industry, both in technology and business, to come together to nurture the startups and share insights with founders and their leadership teams. By embarking on Growth Tunes with ISB, we are leaning on the best minds around the globe to enable our startups to scale, grow and lead in their individual domains," said Neel Bhatia, Senior Director, Startup Ecosystem and Strategic Industry Collaborations, Intel India, at the launch of the series last week.

"We have handpicked the participating startups for each of the sessions depending on the particular values that they can extract and the learnings that they can leverage from these sessions. Different startups need different treatments," he added.

Championed by the ETC, Intel Startup Program in collaboration with ISB kicked off the Growth Tunes series with a live talk session delivered by Vish Krishnan, a professor and endowed chair at the University of California and a professor affiliate at the Harvard University Lab for Innovation Science. Krishnan shared his insights on 'Product Management for Growth and Scale', specifically with regards to the deep-tech ecosystem, with a select virtual audience invited for the session.

As part of his talk, the professor underlined three key focus areas for Indian startups to achieve desirable growth: how to prepare for sound, rapid and consistent growth; how to achieve 'graceful growth'; and how to produce an evolution of the product offering that enables such a growth.

Krishnan explained, "The dictionary meaning of the word 'graceful' is elegant and beautiful, but what we mean by 'graceful growth' here is for it to be harmonious, smooth, consistent, predictable, smart, strategic, creative, and innovation-driven with calculated risks. For instance, Israel has been able to grow their startup ecosystem gracefully by really leveraging their knowledge economy and consequently being able to punch way above their weight class: they have been minting out so many startups for such a small country. Wouldn't it be nice for us to have that from India?"

Later in the talk, a startup founder among the audience pointed out to the professor that what made the 'Israel model' possible was a kind of mutual assistance that startups offered each other to build the ecosystem together as opposed to a few major players establishing dominance in the market. Agreeing with the argument, Krishnan replied, "Consider Growth Tunes: this is the kind of initiative that builds ecosystems, which are very important. Organizations can learn a lot from other systems, including biological ones. It all comes down to a healthy balance between cooperation and competition vis-à-vis a definite set of resources."

Post the session, the participants were requested to share their overall experience. "The case study-based sessions provided a way to understand complex topics very easily and in a manner that everyone can relate to," said Vijay Anand, CTO, Tenxer Technologies. "The talk was most relevant to plan for scaling and growth of new technology companies in the enterprise sector," said Vinodh Venkatesan, co-founder, Jidoka Technologies.

Mahir Mehta, Business Development Director, IOTG BU and Intel Startup Program, who delivered the vote of thanks for the session, outlined that the next instalment of the series will be announced shortly.