Starting as a brewer to the most successful entrepreneur, what have been your learnings?
First and foremost, entrepreneurship is about taking an idea to the market. So as an entrepreneur we need to get a good business idea. Then the whole thing is about how you execute that business idea into a workable module. That is what entrepreneurship is all about and you should be excited about doing that. So if people are excited about taking that business idea to the market then you are a good entrepreneur, because you need to be passionate to succeed. I had absolutely no business experience when I started Biocon in 1978, but I had a great business idea. I wanted to use biotechnology to develop products, and these products were going to be very interesting, very unique, and very different and I knew where these products could be used. Initially, I started with enzymes and I was very familiar with enzymes because I studied brewing science which was all about enzymes. I decided to begin with developing enzymes which nobody had thought of at that time. The biggest challenge was to convince people to use enzymes because they had never used enzymes in their processes and to convince them to change from chemical process to enzymatic process was a big challenge. It happened, but not as fast as I wanted it to happen. I thought everyone would love my idea, I would be able to succeed very fast but that was not the case. As an entrepreneur, the biggest challenge is to translate the business idea into commercial success and for that to happen you have to have the backing from the customers. You have to position the product in the market in such a way that people believe that this is a very interesting product. It took almost 3-4 years before I could get people to buy my product. The other challenges were getting people work for me and getting banks to lend money to me!
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First and foremost, entrepreneurship is about taking an idea to the market. So as an entrepreneur we need to get a good business idea. Then the whole thing is about how you execute that business idea into a workable module. That is what entrepreneurship is all about and you should be excite
d about doing that. So if people are excited about taking that business idea to the market then you are a good entrepreneur, because you need to be passionate to succeed. I had absolutely no business experience when I started Biocon in 1978, but I had a great business idea. I wanted to use biotechnology to develop products, and these products were going to be very interesting, very unique, and very different and I knew where these products could be used. Initially, I started with enzymes and I was very familiar with enzymes because I studied brewing science which was all about enzymes. I decided to begin with developing enzymes which nobody had thought of at that time. The biggest challenge was to convince people to use enzymes because they had never used enzymes in their processes and to convince them to change from chemical process to enzymatic process was a big challenge. It happened, but not as fast as I wanted it to happen. I thought everyone would love my idea, I would be able to succeed very fast but that was not the case. As an entrepreneur, the biggest challenge is to translate the business idea into commercial success and for that to happen you have to have the backing from the customers. You have to position the product in the market in such a way that people believe that this is a very interesting product. It took almost 3-4 years before I could get people to buy my product. The other challenges were getting people work for me and getting banks to lend money to me!
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