UDDYAM'09 was organised by the Entrepreneurship Committee of SPJIMR in association with Technopreneur Promotion Programme (TePP), Govt. of India & National Innovation Foundation (NIF) on the 7th of February'09. National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) was the student partner for UDDYAM.

The objective of UDDYAM is to culminate in an enterprise building exercise by bringing together innovators and people on a lookout for business opportunities. UDDYAM started off with an inaugural address by Prof. M.S. Rao, Chairperson, Entrepreneurship Cell, SPJIMR.Dr. Sesha Iyer, Director, SPJIMR, laid stress on social entrepreneurship and how it can revolutionise the face of India. The Chief Guest for the event, Mr. Arun Nanda, Executive Director and President - Infrastructure Development, Mahindra & Mahindra delighted the packed house with his invaluable insights on business and entrepreneurship. He emphasised on the need for managers to think with an entrepreneurial bent of mind as he did while launching various businesses such as Club Mahindra, Mahindra World Cities at Mahindra and Mahindra. After an inspiring talk by Mr. Arun Nanda, Mr Kuljeet Chadha, owner of the Parking Lot restaurant chain, and an alumnus of ISB, Hyderabad brought out the intricacies of the problems he faced while started out as an entrepreneur and how reality turned out to be much different from his business plan on paper.

Uddyam'09 focused on providing an ecosystem for developing new business ideas from grassroots and technology based innovations. Uddyam'09 featured two design houses Onio Design, Pune and Idea Product Design, Ahmedabad, which can help entrepreneurs in customising the innovations with design changes to suit commercial needs.

As a prelude to UDDYAM, 12 innovations from TePP and NIF were floated to B-School students across the country to analyse the business opportunity that each innovation offers. 5 teams were short listed to present their innovation plans at UDDYAM. The presentations were impressive and detailed the business opportunities for diverse and interesting innovations such as a power saving geyser & mobile phone operated electric switch.

After two and half hours of rigorous presentations and discussions the NITIE, BIM Trichy and SPJIMR teams emerged as winners of Uddyam'09 and received the prize money of Rs. 40000 each.

UDDYAM served as a perfect way to kick start the NEN E-Week Celebrations.

UDDYAM is over, what next? Awareness about the grassroots level and technical innovations was created amongst entrepreneurs and the students. Any one interested in taking ahead these innovations can approach TePP and NIF with SPJIMR acting as a bridge to bring about this marriage between innovators and interested entrepreneurs. With Idea and Onio Design Houses in the picture, the innovations can be adapted to suit different business applications with immense opportunities.