Tuesday, October 06, 2026
Date(s): 6th October 2026
Time: 2.00 Pm to 6.00 Pm
Venue: Seminar Hall, Dr. D.Y. Patil B School
Resource Person:
1. Mr. Abhijeet Phadke – Founder and Managing Partner, Dhaval Technologies.
2. Mr. Parag Shellikeri – Managing Director, Trutek Systems Combine Pvt. Ltd.
3.Ms. Kranti Kkaulgud, Director, Victory Polychem Pvt. Ltd.
4. Ms. Bharti Gokhale, Data Analytics Health Enthusiast.
5. Mr. Girish Vispute, Executive Director, Furnteck Engineers
6.Dr. Jitendra Sandu (Director) – Moderator
Participants PGDM Students and Faculties
Faculty Coordinator Mr. Shubhendra Panwar
Organizer SIC, IIC and Academics
Objectives of the Competition:
The forum was organised with the following objectives:
1.To provide practical exposure to entrepreneurship by enabling students to learn directly from successful founders and business leaders.
2. To understand the entrepreneurial journey and recognise that business success is often the result of continuous learning, adaptation, perseverance, and calculated risk-taking.
3. To develop an entrepreneurial mindset among students by encouraging creativity, innovation, initiative, problem-solving, and opportunity recognition.
4. To understand real-world business challenges faced by entrepreneurs while starting, managing, sustaining, and scaling their ventures.
5. To bridge the gap between classroom learning and industry practice through direct interaction with experienced entrepreneurs.
6. To develop decision-making and risk-management skills by understanding how founders evaluate opportunities, challenges, uncertainties, and business risks.
7. To promote innovation and adaptability by highlighting the importance of responding effectively to changing customer needs, technologies, competition, and market conditions.
8. To provide insights into business growth and scalability, including the challenges associated with expanding operations, building teams, managing resources, and maintaining competitiveness.
9. To inspire students to consider entrepreneurship as a career option and encourage them to explore opportunities for creating their own ventures.
10. To facilitate industry–academia interaction by creating a platform for meaningful engagement between students, faculty members, entrepreneurs, and industry professionals.
Detail Report
Entrepreneurship is rarely a straight line. It is a journey shaped by bold decisions, unexpected challenges, failures, learning experiences, resilience, and opportunities that emerge along the way. To provide students with a practical understanding of entrepreneurship and business leadership, the MSME Founders’ Forum was organised on 6 October 2026 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.
The forum brought together five distinguished business leaders and founders for an engaging and insightful conversation on what it truly takes to build, sustain, and scale a business in today's dynamic and competitive business ecosystem.
Moderated by Dr. Jitendra Sandu, Director, the forum provided students with an opportunity to listen to firsthand experiences of entrepreneurs and industry leaders. The session moved beyond conventional classroom learning and enabled students to understand the realities of starting and managing a business, including decision-making, risk-taking, market challenges, innovation, leadership, financial considerations, and business growth.
The interaction was designed to bridge the gap between academic knowledge and entrepreneurial practice by exposing students to authentic business experiences and perspectives from leaders who have navigated the complexities of the entrepreneurial journey.
The central theme of the forum focused on the reality that entrepreneurship is not a predictable or linear journey. While business plans and academic frameworks provide a foundation, entrepreneurs frequently encounter unexpected market conditions, operational challenges, financial constraints, competition, technological changes, and changing customer expectations.
The forum therefore focused on the practical dimensions of entrepreneurship, including:
• Identifying and evaluating business opportunities
• Taking calculated risks
• Converting ideas into viable business models
• Managing uncertainty and unexpected challenges
• Learning from failures and setbacks
• Building effective teams
• Developing customer-centric businesses
• Innovation and adaptability
• Managing resources effectively
• Sustaining business operations
• Scaling and expanding a venture
• Developing resilience and entrepreneurial leadership
4. Proceedings of the Event
The MSME Founders’ Forum commenced at 2:00 p.m. on 6 October 2026. The session was structured as an interactive forum rather than a conventional lecture, allowing students to gain diverse perspectives from the participating founders and business leaders.
The session was moderated by Dr. Jitendra Sandu, Director, who facilitated the conversation and encouraged the founders to share their personal entrepreneurial experiences, challenges, successes, failures, and lessons learned.
The discussion highlighted the fact that successful entrepreneurship involves much more than having a good business idea. Entrepreneurs need to possess the ability to identify opportunities, make timely decisions, respond to uncertainty, understand customers, manage people and resources, and continuously adapt to changing business environments.
The founders shared insights from their entrepreneurial journeys and discussed the realities associated with establishing and growing a business. Their experiences provided students with a realistic understanding of how business decisions are made in situations where information may be incomplete and outcomes may be uncertain.
The interaction also emphasised the importance of resilience and learning from setbacks. Students were encouraged to view challenges and failures not merely as obstacles but as opportunities for learning, improvement, and innovation.
5. Key Learning Areas
5.1 Opportunity Recognition
The forum emphasised the importance of identifying genuine market opportunities. Students learned that entrepreneurs need to observe changing customer needs, emerging trends, market gaps, and technological developments to identify potential business opportunities.
5.2 Decision-Making Under Uncertainty
Entrepreneurs frequently have to make decisions without having complete information. The founders highlighted the importance of combining data, experience, intuition, market understanding, and calculated risk-taking while making entrepreneurial decisions.
5.3 Resilience and Learning from Failure
One of the important takeaways from the forum was that setbacks are an integral part of entrepreneurship. Students were encouraged to develop resilience and use failures as learning opportunities rather than viewing them as permanent barriers to success.
5.4 Innovation and Adaptability
The dynamic business environment requires entrepreneurs to continuously innovate and adapt. The interaction highlighted the need to remain responsive to changes in technology, customer preferences, competition, and market conditions.
5.5 Building and Managing Teams
The discussion also brought attention to the importance of people in building successful organisations. Effective leadership, communication, delegation, employee engagement, and team building were identified as important factors in sustaining business growth.
5.6 Customer-Centric Approach
Students gained an understanding of the importance of knowing the customer and continuously responding to customer expectations. Building a sustainable business requires entrepreneurs to create meaningful value rather than focusing solely on products or services.
5.7 Sustaining and Scaling a Business
Starting a business is only the first stage of entrepreneurship. The forum highlighted the challenges involved in sustaining operations, managing resources, developing systems, entering new markets, and scaling a business while maintaining quality and customer satisfaction.
Dr. Jitendra Sandu, Director, moderated the forum and guided the discussion towards issues that are particularly relevant to management students and aspiring entrepreneurs.
Through relevant questions and interactions with the founders, the moderator encouraged discussion around entrepreneurial decision-making, business challenges, leadership, innovation, growth, and sustainability.
The moderation ensured that the forum remained focused on providing students with practical and actionable insights rather than limiting the discussion to theoretical concepts.
Student Engagement and Interaction
The forum provided students with an opportunity to engage directly with experienced entrepreneurs and industry leaders. Such interactions enabled students to understand the difference between theoretical business models and their practical application.
Students were encouraged to listen actively, reflect on the experiences shared by the founders, and relate these experiences to concepts studied in areas such as:
• Entrepreneurship Development
• Strategic Management
• Marketing Management
• Financial Management
• Organisational Behaviour
• Leadership
• Innovation and Business Models
• Operations Management
• Human Resource Management
The interaction also encouraged students to think critically about their own entrepreneurial ideas and career aspirations.
Major Takeaways for Students
The forum provided several important takeaways:
• Entrepreneurship requires courage, persistence, and adaptability.
• A business idea becomes meaningful only when it creates real customer value.
• Entrepreneurs must be willing to take calculated risks.
• Failures and setbacks can provide valuable lessons for future decisions.
• Continuous learning is essential for entrepreneurial success.
• Effective leadership and team building are critical for business growth.
• Entrepreneurs must remain alert to emerging market opportunities.
• Innovation should be viewed as an ongoing process rather than a one-time activity.
• Scaling a business requires effective systems, people, resources, and strategic planning.
• Entrepreneurial success requires the ability to balance vision with execution.
Outcome of the Programme
The MSME Founders’ Forum successfully provided students with meaningful exposure to the realities of entrepreneurship and business leadership. The interaction strengthened students' understanding of the challenges and opportunities associated with starting and growing a business.
The programme contributed to the development of:
• Entrepreneurial thinking
• Critical thinking and problem-solving
• Decision-making skills
• Risk awareness
• Leadership orientation
• Innovation mindset
• Business opportunity recognition
• Industry awareness
• Confidence and professional outlook
The forum also strengthened the connection between academia and industry by creating an avenue for direct interaction between students and experienced business leaders.
Conclusion
The MSME Founders’ Forum held on 6 October 2026 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. was an enriching and insightful learning experience for the students.
The forum effectively demonstrated that entrepreneurship is not a predetermined path but a journey involving opportunities, uncertainty, challenges, experimentation, failures, learning, and continuous adaptation. The firsthand experiences shared by the five distinguished founders provided students with perspectives that cannot be fully acquired through textbooks alone.
The programme reinforced the importance of developing an entrepreneurial mindset characterised by innovation, resilience, calculated risk-taking, customer focus, adaptability, and execution capability.
The interaction with founders and industry leaders provided students with a realistic understanding of the business ecosystem and encouraged them to approach entrepreneurship with greater confidence, preparedness, and strategic thinking.
Overall, the MSME Founders’ Forum served as an effective platform for experiential learning, industry–academia interaction, entrepreneurial awareness, and leadership development, contributing meaningfully to the holistic development of management students.