Lecture organised at NEHU

HT Bureau
GUWAHATI, April 23: The Incubation and Enterprise Support System of IIM Shillong in collaboration with the Incubation Centre of NEHU organised ‘Impact Lecture and Experience Sharing on Innovation, Communities and Decentralized Future’. The resource persons for the programme were Jonathan Pereira, developer relations at Polygon and Akash Shukla, developer relations at Polygon. Jonathan has been driving developer community centric initiatives for over a decade to help build and scale innovation in the global tech ecosystem. He has been an integral part of early teams of well-known unicorn startups like Postman, Automation Anywhere, and Chef Software, and has helped scale them. In his address to the students Jonathan Pereira highlighted the students about the decentralized future and the prospects on web techs in the near future. He spoke about crypto currency, block chai, Web 3 and the unexplored infinite potential of the internet.
Akash Shukla in his address touched upon the different aspects of 21st century skills, innovation methodologies which included certain key aspects like empathy, prototyping, testing, etc., along with relevant examples from the local Indian ecosystem. Post that he touched upon the necessity of community in steering up one’s learning and the ways to possess the right mindset to learn along with the relevant resources emphasised on the community development prospects to solve the day-to-day problems and about a startup is just an idea to begin with. Akash has been a part of global startup communities, skilling, and innovation initiatives. He has personally seen the impact of his programs on 3 lakh plus people across 20+ countries. He is empaneled as a business mentor for Google for Startups Accelerator, Europe & Africa and has been a part of Antler, Amsterdam (a VC firm) as an Entrepreneur in Residence. For his work, he got invited by the President of India & the Director General’s Office, United Nations, Geneva. He has coached 100+ startup founders globally. He got trained in various innovation & problem-solving methodologies ranging from MIT’s Co-Innovation model, Stanford’s Design Thinking framework to Sprint methodology by Google Ventures. He has also led a Healthcare Innovation lab kick-started by MIT. IIM Shillong also enhanced the Centre for Development of North Eastern Region (CeDNER) of IIM Shillong and encouraged the students to aspire to work for the development of the community at the grassroots level and increase the scope of employability in the region.
Prof. Divesh Walia, HoD, Environmental Sciences and head of Incubation Centre, NEHU was present for the occasion among others.