Discover the Path to Business Growth - An Interactive Workshop  A buzzing event with lots of networking was organised on 30th September 2014 at Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn. Steve Woods, Director of Roaring Success, and our IITAV members Abaran Deep, Partner – Business Strategy & Optimisation, PCI Group and Sanjiv Bhasin, Director, Bestech Australia, participated in this session. The goal of the event was to develop strategies that would help the respective businesses of our IITAVians, with assistance from Steve and the audience. More than 20 IITAV Members and non-members were present at the event. Steve Woods started the session with a presentation of 9-sided growth cube, which covered several business strategies, product innovation and market penetration. Abaran and Sanjiv provided an overview of their respective businesses and presented one of their organisation's goals that they sought advice on. The audience brainstormed these two goals to provide several, wide-ranging solutions. Given the problem and possible solutions, Steve, with the help of his tools, dissected these in a methodical manner to provide a few options that Abaran and Sanjiv could use to achieve their goals. The feedback from the audience was very positive and the event provided a good networking opportunity. Many thanks to Swinburne University, IITAV Corporate member for providing us the venue.

Informal Networking Event You may remember that in our August newsletter, we mentioned the successful informal event organised by IITAV in the Melbourne CBD. Following the interest, Nikhil Kumar organised another informal catchup at The Elephant and Wheelbarrow, Melbourne on 19th August 2014. It was even better with a number of new members attending the event and a few alumni joined IITAV on that day. After a brief networking session, IITAV President Raj Rajakumar welcomed all new members. The new members were given an opportunity to share their ideas for development of IITAV and they floated several interesting ideas.  The event provided a relaxed atmosphere at the end of a busy day and it was heart-warming to see so many turning up to meet fellow Alumni.

IIT Delhi has signed an MoU with the Mauritius Research Council (MRC) to facilitate setting up a research academy in Electrical, Electronics and Computer Science Engineering at Mauritius. MRC aims to develop this academy to a world class research platform by attracting talents from around the world. (More ) IIT Delhi's industrial arm, "Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer" and IISc Bengaluru had signed agreements with French defence major, Safran, to collaborate on the research and development of the next generation aerospace technologies. (More )   Entrepreneurs from IITs  are attracting more Venture Capitalists to provide financial support for their novelty and innovation. IITs have ranked 4-th in the list of top 50 universities whose entrepreneurs are backed by Ventrure Capitalists. This list was compiled by PitchBook, a global private equity and venture capital data research firm. It can be noted that IITs were ranked 10-th in last year's compilation. (More )

We welcome Devindra Weerasooriya, Manjit Lekhi,  Suresh Banaswadi, Uday Dubey, Vipin Gaindhar and Vishal Aggarwal into our family of IITAV Members. We also  take this opportunity to thank all Members for their continued participation in IITAV activities.

Raj Rajakumar(President)   Ravi Singh (Vice-President)   Dilip Desai (Secretary)   Rachana Kaudinya(Treasurer)   Nikhil Kumar   Abaran Deep   Kapil Talwar   Rakesh Saraf   Sridhar Karuppasami More information on the Committee members can be found here

We take this opportunity to thank everyone for their contributions. Special thanks to our Committee Members, Kapil Talwar, Dilip Desai and Raj Rajakumar for their efforts in producing this newsletter. To help us improve the newsletter, please send your feedback and contributions (news, views and memories) for the next issue to mail@iitav.org.au or Contact Sridhar (Mob: 0423 587 163, kprsridhar@yahoo.com). Previous editions of the newsletter are available here . Members are also requested to update their profiles at our website. Thank you. Sridhar  Karuppasami (On behalf of the IITAV Committee)