Creating Sri Lanka’s next great technology enterprise

By Cassandra Mascarenhas

Promoting economic development in emerging countries by cultivating a new generation of young technology entrepreneurs, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Accelerating Information Technology Innovation (MIT AITI) programme was held in Sri Lanka for the second year and the winners of a gruelling seven-week course were announced last week.

Held in cooperation with the University of Moratuwa, 34 students divided into seven teams from the University’s engineering and IT faculties pitched their business ideas to a panel of judges at Launch Day with the goal of attracting funding and ultimately launching a sustainable and profitable enterprise to help power the country’s economy.

MIT AITI commenced in 2000 and since then has spread its operations across 12 countries and in total, 1,800 students have participated in a variety of interactive courses, ranging from web development to mobile technology.

Previous AITI courses have been very successful with several start-ups achieving profitability and serving as job creators in their regions. Given the technical sophistication of the University of Moratuwa, AITI is confident that its programme in Sri Lanka will break new ground. With the evolution in mobile phones and the advent of global app marketplaces, Sri Lanka’s young entrepreneurs have the opportunity to become an engine of wealth creation for the nation.

Programme administrator Ali Kamil from the University of Massachusetts in his welcoming remarks explained that they had chosen start-ups in mobile and web as these industries have relatively low barriers to entry. “These start-ups are absolutely real. They have real products, real partnerships and real customers. Unlike other programmes that focus on only developing plans, our start-up programme focuses on action.

“In the past seven weeks, these start-ups have developed viable products, created business plans and pitched to investors. We are here because we truly believe that any one of these companies has the potential to be Sri Lanka’s next major technology enterprise, and by extension, power the nation’s growing economy.”

He added that while the programme was a demanding process with the entrepreneurs having to master of kinds of skills from product development, sales and marketing to elevator pitching, through it all, they have exceeded the MIT team’s wildest expectations.

University of Moratuwa Vice Chancellor Prof. A.K.W. Jayawardane noted that the MIT AITI programme has gone a long way in promoting the creation of entrepreneurship at the university and extended his congratulations to the seven teams for coming up with their innovative start-ups whilst thanking the expert team from MIT.

“Creating innovative entrepreneurs has been on the agenda at the University of Moratuwa for the past couple of years. We have always spoken about generating job creators not job seekers and this university is the best place for that. While we have started several initiatives to drive entrepreneurship and innovation, this programme is the most effective and the fastest, transforming students into fully-fledged entrepreneurs in a matter of seven weeks,” he said.

The seven week programme was built up from several components including a hackathon at which the teams built up their alpha products to get to the beta product, guest lecturers and young entrepreneurs sharing their success stories and acting as local role model and it finally culminated with Launch Day at which each start-up team publicly pitched their finished product.

The winners

With AITI guiding the teams in building real mobile/web software start-ups, the group ‘Bitwave’ was awarded Best Technology and Innovation Awards by Dialog Axiata PLC with their start-up ‘Customizerlk.’ Bitwave focused on revolutionising the customised t-shirt printing industry of Sri Lanka via an interactive online designing platform. Their ultimate product, ‘Customizerlk,’ is Sri Lanka’s first online t-shirt customising website and currently, ‘Customizerlk’ has no competitor in a Sri Lankan context.

Waste management is a critical source of lost revenue for most companies due to the lack of mechanism for waste utilisation and with their vision of becoming the country’s most dynamic waste management company, team ‘ZoomEx’ was awarded Best Social Impact award by Mobitel for their start-up titled ‘greenMART.’

Aiming to create sustainable solutions to create an eco-friendly society in which waste is transformed into a resource, ZoomEx’s online business-to-business market will allow companies to buy and sell large volumes of waste including plastics, textiles, paper, metals and other materials. Via ‘greenMART,’ companies will be able to post listings of materials they wish to get rid of and potential buyers can then make offers for them through an online auction.

Team ‘GlassCube’ was awarded both the People's Choice Award by Etisalat and the award for the most promising company by the University of Moratuwa with ‘DriveMODE,’ an Android-based offline mobile application to help pick up calls while driving. It functions solely on voice commands and users simply have to say yes or no to answer or reject a call which is automatically set to loudspeaker mode. Since ‘DriveMODE’ also announces who is calling, there is no need for a driver to look at the phone and can keep an eye on the road and both hands on the wheel at all times.

While there are many hardware-based solutions that address this problem, they too have their own disadvantages and with its offline capabilities and low price of the application, the creators of ‘DriveMODE’ are confident that they have the edge to beat off their competitors.

Taking risks and learning from failures

“Without taking away anything from this amazing show of talent, I must confess that the extraordinary nature of this event is in fact the disappointment. Why I say so is that events of this nature shouldn’t be extraordinary. They ought to happen on a regular basis at universities across this country,” stated MP Harsha De Silva in his keynote address.  

“It must become second nature to bright young people coming out of our universities to think of making it big, to think about applying their knowledge to create wealth instead of picketing for redundant government jobs but the truth is that events like this are so few and far between.”

In that context, he thanked the MIT AITI team, this year led by Ali Kamil and Professor Saman Amarasinghe for having catalysed the creation of these seven enterprises as well as the six last year and the administration of the University of Moratuwa for taking up the challenge. “I hope the next event of this nature will not take another year and it will happen at a university besides Moratuwa!” he added.

As a legislator, he emphasised on his own responsibility to ensure that we create the right environment for entrepreneurship. That includes drafting laws that makes starting a business easy, reducing red tape to obtain authorisations, making it easy to hire and also let go of staff, helping start-ups access finance and reducing excessive taxes on profits to encourage further investments.

“I am not saying that we have not done so, but I think we have quite some ways still to go but at the same time we need attitudinal change in society as well. We as a society must learn to take risks and learn from failures. I am sure most of you know that success rate of new entrepreneurial ventures is pretty low, less than 30 per cent. So the majority of today’s enterprises will also most likely fail. I don’t know out of the six last time, how many are successful today?” De Silva questioned.

In the face of failure, he stated that failure must never be internalised and must not be viewed as a reflection of self but be objectified and looked upon as an experience from which to learn. He then pointed out that most successful people have failed. “No one can really teach you what to expect when you go out there and face the real world, and if the venture turns in to a disaster, how to deal with it will be up to each and every one of you but never be discouraged by failure. Never. Objectify failure in to a learning experience. Learn from failure and do better.”

 – Pix by Shashika Ranasinghe