Entrepreneurship Cell, SKSgi

B-Gyan


1. THE PRODUCT
Easily confused with accounting software and designed and positioned to be precisely nothing akin to that, B-Gyan is a very nascent and currently nebulous piece of spreadsheet-based business plan application software. The product is being developed keeping in mind the dramatic increase in the requirement for easy-to-use business plan generating software.

The product was first conceptualized in the winter of 2010 and presented in a rudimentary form during E-week 2011 workshops. The E-week 2012 workshops will see an upgraded spreadsheet version of B-Gyan.

Once the commercial prototype emerges, it will cater to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and aspiring entrepreneurs who lack the financial muscle to hire the Big Five to study business feasibility and generate b-plans. More importantly, it will enjoy didactic applications - as training software in departmental and EDC programes.

2. THE BUSINESS
The eponymous campus company is looking at the market through a calibrated 1000 day program. Local markets are modest. The next step of marketing will target the growth that is expected to come especially from the smaller towns. Scope for scaling up exists and dynamic web-interfaces and limited vernacularisation are being considered. The target is the small entrepreneur who may not have the skill to handle large, complicated accounting software, nor the wherewithal to employ a B.Tech, CA professional to do it for him or her. The currently vast distance between unlettered, lay business planning and a formal plan document is to be minimized by B-Gyan.

3. THE TEAM
The faculty team operates under the leadership of Prof. Somraj Banerjee and Prof. Partha Chatterjee, FICWA, BCET. Prof. Niloy Kumar Bhattacherjee and Prof. Diwarnav Bhattacherjee are also part of product development. The specifics of prototype development are on the anvil now. The primary concern is to move away from a faculty-driven core team to a new student-driven one, manned by budding MBAs and MCAs of the BCET Business Adminstration (or Management) Block.

4. THE CAMPUS SUPPORT SYSTEM
The EDC and the departmental infrastructure at BECT are fully equipped to provide support. The BCET computer applications labs in the management block have most of the necessary equipment and hardware for the development of the project and subsequent testing. External resources will have to be harnessed at a later stage.

5. THE FINANCIAL REQUIREMENT
Production, market research and advertising and contingent expenses are
all expected to figure in the project. Marketing is a major requirement since the software space is cluttered with like products of unclear qualifications but noisy presence. At the present juncture, the target is to roll out sale-able prototypes with a total outlay of not more that INR 10,000.

But in the next cycles, assuming autonomous demand rises as expected, fund requirements would expand greatly and the modalities are currently being worked out.