 So, here we begin our first session is to get to understand the basics of incubation, basics of business incubation. So, start with a few terms business. Can anybody care to define business? After all, we want to encourage people to undertake business. So, we should have a fairly good idea of what a business is and what is it that we need to teach our people. So, what is the main objective of any business? I am Dr. Sudhir Dume from Niti, Mumbai. According to me, business is known as a verb. It could be business, wealth generation activity or it could be entity or an entity as a noun. That is right. Well, we are concerned with the objective of a business. If you consider business as a noun, then objective of the business is to do business with wealth generation is what you see. Can you elaborate a bit on the wealth generation? Can somebody say that? Because wealth can be generated in multiple ways. Robin Hood, for example, generated wealth in a rather peculiar manner. I don't think we are talking about that kind of wealth generation. I am Vinita Panchanadika from National Chemical Laboratory. Yes, Vinita. I feel wealth generation in earning profits. Okay. I think everybody understands the basic arithmetical definition of profit that we have been taught in our school days. If I say the following, would you agree with that? Profit is equal to price minus cost. Swati Jain from NSIT. Yes, Swati. Output cost minus input cost. Output cost. Output minus input. It is roughly revenue minus expenditure. But in more familiar terms to a plain normal human being, it's a difference between price and cost. So all the cost that you incur for making the product or services available and the price you charge or you get, okay, the difference is the profit. That's basically, I think, selling price minus cost price. Yes. Well, that's profit. But what profit? There are different types of profit. Okay. Gross profit and profit. The value to the shareholder. Profit before tax, profit after tax. I think basically business is creating value to the owner by taking risk. Very interesting because what I see is a plethora of technically correct definitions going into the details of the terminology. What I want to emphasize is that the engineering college students right from the first year when they joined your institution or take management students. Management students perhaps would have a better idea of some of these terms, but I'm not so sure. Engineering college students in India certainly do not understand these things well. More importantly, in India where our transition to free market economy is still not complete. Remember, we had a mixed economy for a long time and effectively it meant a command economy as the major economy and a free market economy as a small part. In those days, this formula meant that you evaluated the cost that you incurred on producing anything. Then you decided that it is proper to make 12 percent, 10 percent, 15 percent profit. You added that margin and you defined the selling price. So this is called the administered price regime. If you see in oil sector for example, you're still undergoing that. The reason I mentioned this is that this formula where you set the price and you know the cost and you therefore say the difference is profit is no more valid in free market economy. The free market doesn't care a dab for what your costs are. The free market determines price. If the price is more than the cost that you incur, you make positive profit. If it is less, then you make negative profit and eventually you close down. This fact unfortunately is not emphasized in any one of these subjects that we teach in our engineering curriculum. In fact, we rarely emphasize the detailed costing as I was chatting with some of the friends during the tea break. If you recall any engineering or science or technology course that you teach, a subject that you teach where you emphatically state the costing of whatever you design for. At best many of our teachers indicate the cost of raw material or sub-assemblies which go into that problem. It is obviously not the cost. The first thing that we need to emphasize therefore to any entrepreneur is to understand costing proper. Do we all understand costing properly? That is where we have to begin questioning ourselves. For example, the various components of the cost. So here is what I would like to have input from you. Can you identify the cost? Material, labor, factory, overheads, selling. No, I am not sure this is the total cost. Cost of finance. How many of you are aware about the actual cost of finance in the Indian market? It is 7.5% to 13%. Let me elaborate this a bit further. 7.5% is not a realistic cost. Nobody gets finance at 7.5%. You get 7.5% interest on the deposits that you make. You try to get a loan which is a free market loan. Not as loan from any scheme. You won't get it at 7.5%. Today you won't get anything at less than 13%. Worse, and this is something which is important to stress, this kind of finance costs are okay when banks are willing to give you an advance where your credibility has been established, where you have a market presence and where your revenue returns are well demarked, which means the banks have, banks or any lending agency has faith that you have the ability to repay and therefore their risk evaluation of your venture is at a very comfortable level. But if we are talking about a startup, if we are talking about someone who along with his or her product or services are not known at all, do you genuinely believe that any bank will advance money at this rate? No way. Second, if you go outside the banking system, you go to the large number of rural entrepreneurs. I'll give you one example of rural entrepreneurship. A farmer takes the produce to a weekly market. There is a trader who wants to purchase such commerce and sell it by the evening. That trader needs finance. He is charged 10% per day. Actually more than that, typically if he asks for 100 rupees, he will be given 90 rupees right at the beginning and he will have to return 90 rupees by evening. No, because he has been given 90 rupees, he has to return 100 rupees. So, this is the kind of, of course, you may not call it daily interest because he does not do it daily but he does it weekly and even if you take the total monthly interest or total annual interest that he pays is atrociously large. The situation of a startup endeavor is no different. There are novel ways of paying that kind of interest. So, when you ask for a venture capital, you are actually paying that interest to other means by giving a larger share in the ownership of the company. They are effectively paying that kind of money. We will discuss those details later but here the purpose was to ensure that we understand all the cost elements, a limited purpose. There is one very important cost which is missing, which is the marketing cost. Would you agree that marketing and selling are two different things? Suppose your selling price is 100 rupees or let us take your cost to be 100 rupees. What percentage of the 100 rupees would you attribute to marketing cost? Since you did not mention that as the major cost element, one presumes that it would be negligible. Would you like to attach a percentage to it? Sorry, about 15 percent. Would you, would you like to give a range or your 40 percent, 50 percent, whatever. It is certainly not 1 percent or 2 percent. I would like to recall that none of us identified marketing cost as an important cost component to begin with. In fact, it is not the cost but if the marketing efforts are inadequate, you may actually have zero revenue. Right. So, she is pointing out that the marketing costs are spread on from the product development stages. Actually, we had to postpone another back-to-back workshop which were organized originally here which I had termed as marketing mantra for techno entrepreneurs. Because techno, technical entrepreneurs learn everything about running a business, about funding, about cash flow, about technology, of course, they know everything. But marketing is something which they do not appreciate and understand and now you can see the reason. We who are present here are a fairly representative group of typical middle class India. Typical middle class India does not appreciate a few things, one of which is marketing. We receive marketing from television, from newspapers, from word of mouth, from whatever, whatever, whatever. But we are not aware of the marketing that we are required to do even in our day to day activity. When I appear for interview for a promotion, what am I doing? I am marketing my skills. When I go to venture capitalists to get money, what am I doing? I am marketing too easy. When I come to your incubator to get admission, what am I doing? I am marketing myself and my company to you. Marketing is not just selling your final product and services. Marketing has to be something which has to be imbibed into the philosophy of every entrepreneur in every activity that he or she undertakes. Why I mention that specifically is because our entire academic curriculum just as it does variety of things related to costing, it specifically fails in building appreciation of basic marketing in our day to day. We diversified from the general well generation activity into earning profits and costs and so on so. But we all agree that earning profits is the fundamental motivation of starting an enterprise. How do you think this objective gels with the academic environment where the fundamental motivation is absorption of knowledge and pushing the boundaries of knowledge through research and development. So I will now ask you questions regarding wealth and education. Specifically my question is do you think the objective of earning profits and learning everything about making profits is at loggerheads with the basic academic objective of learning, gaining knowledge and spreading knowledge. Yes, pointy is here so pointy would like, yeah please. Can you hear the question? Yes, my question is and let me also state the purpose of asking this question. Most of us would like such business incubation activities to flourish either within our existing academic institutions or in association with academic institutions because that is where the new knowledge useful for well generation will be happening. So is there a contradiction, is there a dichotomy between the notion of wealth generation and the notion of education or R and D. I will say R and D. I welcome pointy Bhatt who has joined us. Pointy has been the cornerstone of our incubation activities and you will listen to her on 11th I think. So pointy had an opinion on this, yes pointy. Actually wealth has basically larger connotation according to me it's a personal opinion. So let me correct that, let me say profits. Right, so wealth includes profit but basically money. Right, so you maximize profit from innovation and I believe innovation comes essentially out of you know developmental activity learning processes. I think that's a good clue so we can take it that both education and R and D and profit making or profit generation stem from similar foundation. The fundamental foundation is one of which actually is innovation. Anything else? Innovation alone is important but is not the only thing. We will get ethics later into the realm. In fact, in fact ethics is an important work because that is something that gets stressed enormously in the entire educational realm and that seems to be getting diluted enormously as people move on to this side. That's the perception on both side. Tying it together could provide some feedback, a reality check to the education. If the purpose of the education is to provide the skills that are useful for generating money then by having these things together if people going through the incubation discover that they don't have the skills then hopefully that will feed into the education process so that they know how to craft the education to make sure that people have the skills to run a business. I got a point here. Whatever the purpose of education, either skill development, whatever is being said, unless the education cannot create the cost of its own it doesn't have any legitimacy existence. At least it should produce what it consumed. The professor who is consuming has to produce on that day itself. The doctor who is consuming has to produce on that day itself. This is the minimum basic floor level it has to be created to sustain. Maximizing, whether it's maximized or not then in a question, but at least it has to be achieved. This is a Gandhian philosophy of looking at, I understand that. Yes, there is one small point that we miss perhaps in this and which may suggest to all of us why is it that most educationists are not comfortable talking about money. To my mind it appears that the notion of value system which any education must inculcate in the people who are getting educated. That's one of the objectives. It may not be realized explicitly as the costing and other things are not realized, but that is definitely a purpose. So you spoke of ethics. Ethics is one of the values. Now what happens is unfortunately the desire for material wealth. To my mind this is another cornerstone of both education and for profit. You take the enormous competition in the Indian educational field for the IIT entrance exam more than 300,000 students appear. The engineering colleges in the country admit half a million students every year. Why so many students are not admitted to other courses or why they are not seeking admission? Because the perception is that career opportunities are better if you become engineer. Career opportunities are still better if you become an IIT branded. What exactly is in the minds of both the students and the parents when they talk of career opportunities? Is it not material wealth? Primarily it is material wealth. Nobody undertakes education for a B. Take M. Take degree in order to live like a Sadhu in a jungle. Of course they want to become well accepted and acknowledged professionals, but primarily they are driven by the natural human desire for material wealth. And there is no denying that. However in the teaching, learning environment that you find the ethos of the material wealth generation, its absorption, its utilization and all the associated problems are not discussed unless you have a conventional business school in the academic district. In the engineering and science education these things are not generally discussed. And the reason they are not discussed is uncannily. Most of the teachers in some kind of a subconscious way will find the discussion of related issues to be not in consonance with the desire to inculcate values. We had for example when I started the pilot incubator here, we had a big open house in the department of computer science and engineering. All my colleagues including some of my favorite students, all of them are extremely brilliant people. Many of them are from IIT system itself. And some students had a big debate. Most of the faculty members opined that running a business incubator in an IIT like place is not a good idea because it will vitiate the academic atmosphere. Everybody will start thinking only about money and wealth and money and wealth and academics will suffer. This is not a make believe kind of exposition of their thoughts. They genuinely believe that. I would like to submit that similar genuine feelings although articulated differently are likely to exist in every academic institution in the country. The fact of life is and this is what I said to my colleagues as well that don't you think that even as teachers while we are teaching technology and supposedly talking about values, are we not as human beings interested in desire for material wealth? Why is it otherwise that every pay commission report which increases the salary of teachers is looked at very joyfully by all the teachers? If I am not interested in material wealth, I would care one foot for that. It doesn't happen like. Unfortunately the fact that material wealth generation and the value systems need not be at logger heads has somehow not been appreciated well. I elaborate this to indicate that when you go back and try to do these kind of things, some of the opposition that you might find from your own colleagues who are well-meaning people, but you will find that opposition because of this perceived logger head of the values of ethics that need to be inculcated and the assumption that you cannot teach ethics if you are simultaneously talking about money. Believe me, this is going to be one of the biggest challenges. It is never articulated. It is never stated, but it is at the back of every articulation that anybody does about this. It is not easy to handle. That is what I wanted to suggest. We will now move over to the next point. I hope I have made this point clear. So two points. One is about basic costing because we ourselves are not very clear on the components. We are unable to train our students in our regular subjects and therefore when they become or try to become entrepreneurs, there is a problem that they face. In India, the situation is actually perhaps slightly different than many other countries. In India, we have traditional family trades. For example, if my name is Jai Nagarwal or Shah, the business equipment flows in my blood. But if my name is any one of the typical middle class names, I generally do not have any clue about money matters. 50 years ago, every typical middle class family in India used to have certain discipline about economic behavior, namely that every day daily accounts of expenditure would be written typically by the mother of the house. Many of you will recall this, you know, daily diving. So I remember in 1956-57 when I was in Rathlam, in Jagdalpur, in Raipur, there would be, you know, sugar, 8 anas, there is so much, whatever, whatever be the expense. It is not as if my father was rich. He was a paid employee and was getting a fixed income. But it was considered important to account for all the income and expenditure of the family. If you find the new generation, you will rarely find people keeping accounts. This again may be a small fact, but I believe it is important because it shows that during the student days, the society including us teachers are keeping our students almost deliberately away from simple appreciation of accounting practices. Some feedback you can carry into the education system if you can. About costing, as I was sharing with some of you, in computer science department two of us, my colleague, Professor S.S.P. Rao, who is retired now, and I, he in his electronics course and I in my business information systems course would start the course with a quiz on the day one. And we will say list the prevailing market prices estimates of the following items. His list will include various kinds of chips, measuring instruments, including soldering iron, whatever, whatever, whatever. My list will include servers, PCs, modems, routers, including computer furniture, table, chair. Can you believe that for a table, I have got cost estimates ranging from 20 rupees to 200,000 rupees. Very obviously these people have no clue on how much a wooden table cost. This state of affairs is generally not good, and it is particularly detrimental to encourage entrepreneurship of the kind where we are talking about wealth generally. Believe me friends, these might appear to be small points, but these are the small things which go into the mindset of individuals. And in our context, we would do well to remember this, to have some kind of an entrepreneurship 101 course, which my colleague, Professor Lagu had actually defined. We are trying to release that entrepreneurship 101 course in open source again, so that people could benefit. Where particularly for India, you might actually spend one hour emphasizing only these points, something of this sort. Let us go for that. So what we discussed about was business. Now we talk about incubation. It is clear to us that people who want to start businesses would like to generate material wealth. We would prefer if they generated material wealth using some product developed, built on some technology. It could also be generated. Wealth could also be generated by building services. Wealth could also be generated by building products which are well known, but producing them in a different way. Innovation is not necessarily only in new technology. Innovation is in the way to handle things, existing things. Given this, we could have people who might be actually interested in doing some innovative things so as to generate wealth. And they would like to start doing that as early as possible. Our ambition is to help such people on that path. That is what entrepreneurship promotion is. Incubation is only one part of that entrepreneurship promotion activity. So let's talk about entrepreneurship first and then we will talk about incubation. Any definition of entrepreneurship in the context of building businesses? Would you agree that entrepreneur in this context is essentially a prospective businessman? Sorry? I must emphasize that this definition is only in the context of wealth generation by a startup company. Otherwise, entrepreneurship is required in every walk of life. You have to be enterprising even to set up a new department in a government setup. So what NCL is doing is no less than entrepreneurship. Yes, yes, yes. So entrepreneurship is generally required but here we are talking about creating self-employed business person. Would that necessarily be a single person? So let's come and comment on the organizational structure for such businesses. It could be a single trader or a single person who has a family-owned business. Usually the one person starts it. His or her children get involved into that family business. They expand it further, their children and so on. Not only this country but the whole world is full of such instances where enterprising individuals do such innovative things. Most of such things are found in plain trading, most of such. So plain trading is a fundamental aspect of wealth generation. There they do not necessarily generate products but they find out where the products are available at the lowest possible cost and where the products can be sold at the highest possible price. And the cost of course includes distribution and everything that we said and that's how they make profit. And towards that they might add a few value-added services. Now these value-added services could be very mundane or could be very minimal or could be very high-end. If you talk about a product, they could further refine the product to do a value-added. They could actually buy sub-products and put them through assembly. They could put their own support system behind that product although the individual component was providing that. There were a variety of apps. When one or more such business persons come together, you actually form a business entity. That business entity generally gets called as a company. I hope you are familiar with the types of companies. So you have partnership firms, you have limited companies, you have private companies. They have a variety of apps. I would like to suggest that the notion of such company organizations is not something that is natural to humanity. If you see the growth of 5000 years of humanity, there have been such organized structures. For example, if old times you take Pedi which is like a modern bank, they were mostly family-run businesses, trading houses. But the notion of a legal company as a legal entity and a limited company as a legal entity with its charter, with its liabilities limited, et cetera, is of relatively recent origin. See, about 250 years old. As compared to 4000 years of human history, this is something new. Although all of us take these things for granted, it is important to remember that this is of a recent origin because like everything else has had an accelerated growth, all of these have become now part and parcel and fixture of our day-to-day lives. But it was not always so. And one is not sure what will be the way that these companies shall take in future. But these are essentially individual commonalities. In last 250 years, you will also observe that some of these companies become extraordinarily rich and therefore they tend to extend their power into realms other than their generation. So the interference or whatever you may call in the political lives of people, in the social lives of people, in the economic lives of people generally stemmed from any organization which becomes large. In that sense, they often become indistinguishable from small country states or nation states. I am digressing but it is important to recognize that. What we are talking about, we come back to this, is the creation of the root of such an enterprise which may grow large. I hope it is very clear to us that we are not talking about creating enterprises which remain one-person enterprise for the rest of their lives. There is no benefit in that. We want to create companies or enterprises which will actually grow with their business. One of the articulated motives all of us agree was to create jobs. Create jobs means such people who are not interested in entrepreneurial activities or who do not have that bug for creating something themselves would generally join as a worker in any one of the enterprises. If you take government also as an enterprise, then all of us usually are working for an enterprise, a business enterprise. If you look at that for a business purpose. And there are always such people who are larger in number. The endeavor of our activity is to get as large a percentage of such people, inject them with enthusiasm for entrepreneurship and help them set up enterprises so that more and more distributed wealth generation happens in the country. To this end then it is necessary to educate the entrepreneurs or such individuals into the art of company building as well and tell them everything from the legal aspect, from the operational aspect, from the funding aspect, from the cash flow aspects of how a company should work. Would you agree with that? That this important knowledge should be parted. Curiously, all such issues related to company formation, company operations and company enhancement are considered a natural part of any management education. And curiously they are almost always considered an unnatural part of any technology education. So we have a dichotomy here. You will recall that Professor Zuzer Wasi was mentioning that one advantage we have is that we have a business school on the campus and we also have a lot of engineering or technology departments. The major knowledge about how to set up and run companies financially is available in the management institutions. That's the reason why IIMs in India and other management institutions are natural places where the students who come in to learn those things automatically learn all of those things. However, they do not necessarily have access to technology. The situation in India at least as far as IIMs are concerned and in fact as far as many other well-known management institutions are concerned is changing for a different reason altogether. The reason is that a very large number of engineering undergraduates are going to do management. This is not necessarily so globally. People who undertake management education could come from any background. They could come from literature, they could come from commerce, they could come from law, they could come from practically any profession. In India, I believe it is stated that the percentage of engineering students doing management is more than 50 percent. As a result, these students bring some engineering technology knowledge and some analytical skills. And believe me, since education is a societal process, a community process, when such students are sitting in a class, the knowledge moves around, the knowledge gets shared. Yeah, sorry, some observation. Prasad from Niti? Yes. I mean, taken a little apart from technology, the management is much more coming closer to professional educational economic disciplines, other than even technology, for example, law, medicine, other kind of thing. That way if you take it up, I think a good number of professional students are coming to management other than even arts, science, arts and social science students. That was the one of the important things. Yes. A good percentage, maybe around 80 percent will be from professional courses. Thank you. Yes, that's what I was about to mention. Engineering has somehow got symbolized with good knowledge of technology, good knowledge of processes, good knowledge of analytics, et cetera. You will find a large number of exceptions. There are people who have no engineering degree, but are better engineers than formal professionals. In fact, there are some engineers that you see, where you distinctly get worried as to how anybody could give that person an engineering degree. It is not universally true. What universally true is that most of the engineering students, because of the necessarily rigmarole of the subjects that they learn, they get to understand some things here. No way to have abilities are completely independent of the background of any individual. There are absolutely nothing to do whether you are engineering student, law student or whether you are completely illiterate individual. I don't know how many of you have heard of this case, when the great production in the district of Nasik and around in Maharashtra went to an extent where wineries came up here. And they wanted to take a delegation to Australia to illustrate how the farmers in Nasik have done this great production. And they were hunting for a real expert. And practically everybody told them the real expert is so and so farmer in a village near Nasik. And when the government came to meet him, the poor fellow was a 5th standard school, 5th standard pass vernacular speaking person with no clue about English. But he ran the best great farm. So they took him there and they actually appointed a translator for him. So he would be asked questions in English in Australia, he would answer in Marathi and somebody will translate those Marathi questions. So please remember that. The question is nothing but these are unfortunately exceptions. However coming back to our notion of incubation and supporting incubation. We realize that A, we have to inculcate the spirit of entrepreneurship in people. And B, such people who come forward to undertake such risky endeavours have to be held by us. Will it be alright to therefore state that the purpose of incubation is to fold? One, to build around the entrepreneurial promotional activities that the environment, your institution or others are taking. Set up a process by by which people so charged and who are willing to take the risk of setting up a profit making enterprise are looking for some assistance. And you say yes here is a business incubator which will give you the necessary assistance. Will that be a good composite objective of an incubator? Because from a plain English terminology point of view incubator is a place where eggs are hatched. So you bring to life you bring to real life something which is dormant. Creation of that dormant objective may not be the job of the incubator. But without something around in the environmental vicinity creating that seed it is unlikely that the incubator will get enough feed for sustaining its activity. In short an incubator cannot exist or function in isolation or in a vacuum. The environment must be filled with enthusiasm for entrepreneurship. The environment must actually try to inculcate this risk taking abilities amongst people and only from such people whether it is from your town or other towns it is immaterial. Only from such people you will get those who want to take the next real step. Feeling good about taking risk is one thing translating that feeling into a decision making and saying okay I will take this risk actually is different. So the objective of an incubator is help I am writing this help the individuals who wish to build companies as an objective. I am deliberately stating individuals incubators will typically admit startups technically you are evaluating a company and technically a company which graduates out of incubator goes out and becomes big or gets wound up or whatever whatever but I am deliberately writing individuals here and this is I would like to submit my own observation that while you evaluate the startup company its business whatever okay you are actually evaluating individuals and you are helping individuals till they incubate as a company although notionally join you they are still individuals and therefore evaluating those individuals mentoring those individuals assisting those individuals and stopping the assistance so that they learn hard facts of life all of these the individuals therefore comprising the startup companies in my opinion should be the main focus of any incubator again I state this because many a times particularly after the incubator acquires a running process and you have at any point in time 10, 15, 20 companies which are sort of incubating there is an input and output that is now stabilized you want to increase this in the hustle bustle of a large number of activities that the incubator will be required to perform which you will learn shortly somewhere there is a danger that the individual may get lost if you lose the individual my opinion is that the success rate to that extent will be affected there is a peoples game at the end of the day one of the evaluation metrics that I set up myself you know when I set up the details of the history later but one of the evaluation metric was I asked Kamal Reiki at the end of the day how do you judge because variety of things of the business plants whatever whatever you really can't take a call you can't validate many of these things he said yes but that is where you have to judge qualitative and then finally he says Professor Fatak look into the eyes of the people and try to judge the fire in their bill can you quantify this ever 73 out of 100 marks for fire in the bill I have no measurement mechanism for doing that 47 marks for the glitter in the eyes how do I measure this and this is whether it is criteria whether it is a metric whatever it is qualitative evaluation almost always at longer heads worse if we do a qualitative evaluation practically everybody objects to it saying that it may not be objective it will be subjective of course it is subjective my qualitative assessment will be different from your qualitative assessment there is nothing wrong in the judgment being subjective as long as that subjective evaluation is not corroded by any bias other than doing a professional judgment if I ever say that hit him in my incubator because he is then that is one subjective judgment but if I say I have spent half an hour talking to this boy and I believe he will do something different he is a different kind of subjective judgment we do need the second kind of subjective judgment we certainly should not have the first kind of subjective problem with the processes that we set up in any eventuality have this issue that how do you state in your processes that there shall be a qualitative evaluation and that will carry weightage so you take for example interviews why do we have interviews what are we doing in interviews if everything was to be decided by a quantitative major we don't require any interview when we admit students in first year of engineering we don't require any interview joint entrance examination marks in physics chemistry maths that's it most of them turn out to be good engineers some of them turn out to be lousy engineers because marks in physics chemistry and maths do not necessarily indicate the qualitative feature of the personality behind those marks when you talk about business incubation or admitting people for such company when you talk about employing an individual for a long term qualitative judgment becomes important I mention this because somewhere you have to factor qualitative judgment as an important component of your processing of people of course you cannot do away with quantitative judgment you have to have quantitative judgment I say that when you have qualitative judgment cousin or somebody will not matter at all he may have the qualities which you can look for but it depends on the person's judgment so if he applies the same judgment for both even cousin can be a good person absolutely very good point that you make in fact in most of the family companies there are many cases where you will find that the original proprietor does not necessarily give the leadership of his company to his son or daughter but to a nephew or to somebody else who can run that business better the problem in case of incubators which are formally set up as a part of the institution is that we all have a responsibility of not only doing the right things but also appearing to be doing the right things the second requirement puts a great onus that is the reason why you will find that when people make qualitative decisions and they are required to be made every now and then certain decisions are questioned based on the background of the individual making those decisions certain decisions are never questioned I will give you an example late professor K. C. Mukherjee my colleague here who was teaching electrical engineering he was a very fastidious teacher his tests and quizzes internal tests and quizzes would be typically of 150 marks and his actual evaluation would be 112.5 out of 100 that was the medicalness through reaching his own son was a P. Tech student sometime later and one of the courses which he was teaching his son was to attend he went to the head of the department said my son is registered for this course so I would like to be exempted I should not teach him because in IIT system if I teach a course I evaluate the students and I give the grades professor K. C. Mukherjee was particularly well known for giving a very out of 50 or 60 students there will be one or two or three A. B. etc etc his son when he joined when he came to that year was one of the toppers in the institute but still said I should not be teaching the head of the department and in fact the entire faculty told him professor K. C. Mukherjee please don't say such nonsense things nobody in the institute will ever say anything he did get an A grade in his course and everybody was convinced that that A grade must have been the most difficult to get in his course that is the stature of an individual there are many amongst us who have that stature but when I run an incubator in an academic setting there will not be one person there will be 4, 5, 10 people can we guarantee that each one of them has exactly the same stature to begin with there might be a youngster who may be helping me running these things that youngster may be required to make a qualitative judgment I know that youngster is absolutely a pride person who will make the correct judgment thus the rest of the world these are the issues that you may have to tackle when you handle this what I am saying is there is no escape from taking qualitative decision because I still believe that the final evaluation of a startup being admitted to an incubator must consist of that free evaluation must you know what you call glitter in the eyes and must consist of an estimate whether that glitter in the eyes and the fire in the belly will not crack under pressure but this will sustain these judgments are all qualitative judgments our friend wants to make an observation I would like to recall one of the presentations where I heard about this partiality where is fair partiality Aditya Birla was given four best companies from Birla group by his grandfather G.D. Birla so there was a big controversy in the industry saying that why such grandson should be given four jewels and the G.D. Birla somebody in family told that he was very partial to give these companies to Aditya Birla because he can only run them so other grandsons have not got such big share and it seems that Aditya Birla has done the history by making the Birla company and MNC in globalization he was a great leader so it seems that partiality pays in that and probably they are very right and big partiality thank you very much for this actually I will just comment that when you talk about partiality or non partiality every time I take a decision in favor of someone and again someone else I am actually being partial so there is nothing wrong in being partial provided that partiality is justified in the context in which I am working I would like this world is not fair that is something that we should all remember IIT system is not fair the IIT system is not designed to guarantee that every student with such and such ability will come in it is designed to guarantee that no student below a certain threshold can ever come in the system is designed to protect itself from reduction of any quality would you agree with that sounds harsh but that is what it is what is an IS officer's entrance test it is not designed to guarantee that every capable person above a certain level will get admitted it is designed to guarantee that no joker can come and sit in the governance of the country in the sense of evaluation like that otherwise are we trying to suggest take marks we say 75% minimum marks are we trying to say that somebody who gets 75.1% mark is decidedly better than someone else who gets 74.9% mark on the contrary in many instances you will find it the other way round once you draw a line of any quantitative major man there will be somebody above it somebody below it does not make it somebody above it makes it there people accept it because there is a quantitative measurement visible to everyone here it is more difficult for people to accept and that is why we have to be more careful in a nutshell I would say that incubation has to be an activity where we help the individuals who wish to build companies but in order to do so apart from doing a whole lot of quantitative things including evaluation we will also have to do qualitative things including evaluation we should be ready for it