Entries in the Category "CASE"
What a week
It gives me an immense pleasure to share with readers of this blog, that yours truly Arpit Gupta has completed an exciting year long journey leading to Masters of Engineering and Management degree on May 18, 2008. Looking back at the year, I have enjoyed every bit of this journey comprising of long working hours, team projects, meetings, documentation and presentations. Beyond doubt I feel greatly excited upon reaching at the other end, but I am surely going to miss everything related to this program. I would like to give special thanks to all faculties in M.E.M. program and TiME staff for organizing this unique program successfully year after year.
This past week I enjoyed attending couple of meetings back to back. One of which was “The Leading EDGE Awards program” organized by Entrepreneurs EDGE to honor the 95 Northeast Ohio value creating companies. Second event was organized by ‘The founder’s café’, a, organization to connect entrepreneurs across North East Ohio and help them out in their various ventures. In the span of two days I met partners, VP’s, CEO’s, Investment bankers, Entrepreneurs (my favorite of course), professors and lot many friends.
These meetings have helped me identify the broad range of organizations that are working to drive value in North East Ohio. I consider myself extremely lucky to have got the chance of working with Entrepreneurs Edge, one such organization in a 2 month internship called as CEO for NEO (Creating Entrepreneurial Organizations for Northeast Ohio). It might sound strange to work on internship after graduation, but for me it’s a one of its kind opportunity to get hands on experience in Entrepreneurship, new product development, and working with various executives and key people of North East Ohio.
Future does looks exciting ahead and will keep all readers updated about my journey.
Elevator Pitch
Its now six weeks into my MEM program and I could not publish any single post after the introductory post on this blog. I did work on numerous topics that I write about, but they just remained as a Word file in my Laptop. Longer I would take to put my thoughts and ideas on this blog; they would lose its relevance. I spend quite a lot of time reading through long lists of blog feeds and searching on internet to keep myself updated about the technology and business knowledge and developments taking place around me. I came across a term called “Elevator Pitch” an interesting phenomenon which represents presenting your idea/business to your intended audience in a very short time and to meet your objective.
Elevator Pitch is all about selling your idea to potential customer in a short time frame, which as this term indicates is taken to be as an average time it took to complete an elevator ride typically less than a minute. In a business environment, it’s always the case that we would want to pass on the message to the desired person/entity to get them triggered towards our business. In a Business to Business (B2B) scenario, if Elevator pitch represents the right requirement of what other business organization is looking for, then it could result in a possible follow up to award your organization a contract leading to your business growth!
Recently, I came across the usage of this term in the context of Venture Capitalist (VC) Funding. An entrepreneur seeking investment from a VC would have just few minutes to speak about their proposal and you are expected to speak everything that is important about your venture in a nice and crisp manner such that VC gets triggered towards your venture and gives you a follow up meeting time. If you miss this opportunity, chances are that you would never get a chance to speak this VC again; so in Economics jargon a LOST Opportunity. I believe Elevator pitch is not limited to speech; but other forms of communications as well like Email, advertisement, self made videos(yes new form of marketing technique), hand written documents, etc. No body reads full email or full form of your message. What he/she takes out of this would depend on your understanding of requirement of your reader.
Another area where I find Elevator Pitch pretty common is Business to Customer scenarios. Customer gets interested in your product if you market it rightly and sell them the features they are interested in buying. So, Elevator Pitch is an important Marketing and Public Relations strategy and if used in a right manner would result in growth for your organization.
Introduction
Hi,
I am Arpit Gupta, a student of MEM class of 2008 and I am from India. I would make an honest attempt to blog frequently here about my learnings from my Masters of Engineering Management program here at CASE. I have been blogging earlier at http://lifeanendlessjoy.blogspot.com/
I have good amount of experience with various conferences, projects and prsentations that I have done in my four years of engineering. You can have a look at my resume at my Website.
I look forward to contributing here and would like to see comments from MEM students, faculty, staff and all the other readers.