TiE Chennai, the city chapter of the global not-for-profit entrepreneur incubation body, The Indus

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Entrepreneurs, will conduct its second annual flagship conference, TiECON Chennai 2009, at the Chennai Trade Centre on November 27 this year. The conference will be the city’s largest entrepreneurs’ conclave with over 1,500 delegates comprising budding entrepreneurs, business leaders, venture capitalists and iBankers.

With the theme, ‘Enterprising India – Creating tomorrow’s entrepreneur’, the conference will focus on issues pertaining to survival of start-ups, said R Ramaraj, president of TiE Chennai.

Entrepreneurs mushroom every year, but not many survive over time despite ample funding options. The recent economic slowdown was testimony to the disappearance of several ambitious entrepreneurs who started big but could not really take off. TiECON will serve as a platform for budding entrepreneurs to share their stories of success and failures and derive lessons from others’ experiences, Ramaraj added.

“We have tailored this year’s theme to address the paradigm shifts that are taking place in the business world – to discuss the new skills that would be required by tomorrow’s entrepreneurs. Some of the speakers for the conference include N Srinivasan, vice chairman and MD, India Cements, CK Ranganathan, chairman and MD of Cavinkare, and Srikkanth, former cricketer,” he said.

TiE has diversified from being a pure-play IT body to an organisation that fosters entrepreneurship across sectors. According to Prof K Jayaram of the Loyola Institute of Business Administration (LIBA), the education sector is the prime attraction for entrepreneurs, contrary to popular association of start-ups with technology.

Of the ten projects LIBA incubated in the last three years, three were in education, mainly relating to online learning. Media and healthcare are other emerging sectors, Jayaram added.

(With inputs from Niranjana Ramesh)