ENTREPRENEURS IN THE EDUCATION SECTOR Education entrepreneurs are visionary thinkers who create new for-profit or nonprofit organizations

from scratch that redefine our sense of what is possible. Education entrepreneursparticularly those who seek to have a sustainable and largescale impact on underserved students and on the system itselfhold a great deal of promise for helping transform our urban public school systems into high-performing organizations. Whether they are creating new charter school systems, developing performance-based preparation programs for teachers and leaders, or designing data assessment tools for educators, education entrepreneurs are worthy of our consideration because they are motivated by a novel vision for how public education could be a different and better systemespecially for underserved students and communitiesand they are creating new organizations to carry out that vision. Some characteristics of such entrepreneurs are Visionary thinkers Start new organizations Believe they can change the way thinks are done Are Social entrepreneurs

CASE 1: EDUCOMP SOLUTIONS

SHANTANU PRAKASH

Both teaching and learning has become more efficient and easier with technology enabled education system. In India, the trend was started by Educomp who implemented technologyenabled education services in schools for the first time. Shantanu Prakash, founder of Educomp, is the man who is responsible for bringing the muchawaited change in the Indian education system. A first generation entrepreneur who has almost single handedly redefined the concept of

technology-enabled education delivery in India, he commands immense respect across the business spectrum for his visionary impact on the education sector in India and across the globe. His successful journey has been chronicled in a book titled Stay Hungry Stay Foolish by Rashmi Bansal. Prakash and Educomp have been recipients of many prestigious awards over the years. Prakash conceived the idea of an education based business while pursuing his MBA at Indian Institute of Management- Ahmedabad, in the late eighties. He says, India represented a unique opportunity in education. The country despite being educationally focused, there were many challenges in this sector. For example education in India is still largely dominated by the Macaulays school of thought where children in schools were largely taught in the same way as was done 100 years back. Education was a field where qualitative advancement has been the slowest. He realized that IT-based education was the way forward and thus founded Educomp in 1994 with a vision to transform the teaching-learning process through the use of technology. He started the enterprise with a seed fund of Rs 1 lakh. When Prakash founded Educomp, computers had barely made an entry in the educational space. But he still went ahead with the belief that school children should be introduced early to computers. The first offering from Educomp was turnkey solution for outsourcing IT integration in schools where the hardware/software, maintenance and teachers training were all Educomps responsibility. This gradually became very popular and Educomp signed on many leading schools like Carmel Convent, Mothers International, Delhi Public School, etc. Prakash then scaled up this service and his company began participating in large government projects for spreading computer literacy in the earlier phase. Presently Educomp has a team dedicated to creating education content. Its pioneering products like Smart Class, Smart Assessment System, Mathguru, Learning Hours are revolutionizing the way children study in classrooms and at home. Last decade and half has been a crucial journey for Educomp that has taken Educomp from a two-room operation to becoming Indias largest education company with market capitalization of over US $1.5 billion. The company was listed on the Indian stock exchange in 2006 and became the best debut scrip for the year. With few important acquisitions, Educomp is now closing in on its mission of becoming among the top 5 e-learning companies globally.

CASE 2: EVERONN EDUCATION

P KISHORE P Kishore, managing director of Everonn Education , took a big bet 24 years ago: use technology to take good quality teachers and content to classrooms in the hinterland. In an interaction with ET, Kishore, who started his career with Synergistic Software and Management Consultants in the early eighties, narrates his entrepreneurial journey and Everonn's blockbuster IPO in 2007. He believed brain retains only 10% of what you read and 20% of what you see and hear. However, the brain retains 40% of what you practice and experience. So he started using the computer as a vehicle to deliver audio-visual learning experience into private schools in India. When he started it there was no concept of Venture Capital. However, many banks funded them, the first bank being State Bank of India . In 2000, Arun Kumar, the founder of Strides Arcolab , who was his classmate as well, invested in the venture. Sat Pal Khattar, an early investor of HDFC Bank , became the second investor in 2002. These investors put in the money because they knew him personally. In 2006, he had his first institutional investor, Singapore's Temasek Holding, which invested $3 million. A year later, the company floated an IPO. They went on to create history. He was looking to raise Rs 50 crore, but ended up getting Rs 7,200 crore. Everonn is now on Asia's 'Best under a Billion 2010' list of companies compiled by the Forbes magazine. However the success should be attributed to the kind of hard work he has put in. In the year 2000, the turning point for the business happened, when they bagged a contract for implementing IT Education to 332 schools in all the 30 districts of Tamil Nadu. He always thought children at the bottom end lack only two things - access to good teachers and exposure to modern content. In India, there is a big divide between rural and urban students. So, he embarked on this mission of taking good quality teachers and content to the remotest part of India. They established a technology platform and started delivering content through VSAT, a satellite communications system. It was very simple and higly interactive. Through this platform, students sitting in tier-III towns and villages could sit together and learn. Now his mission is to create a new breed of educational entrepreneurs or edu-preneurs in every district of India by sharing the knowledge and technology with them.