Inculcating entrepreneurial skills: FPS students develop, execute their business plans

25 teams worked on the four P’s — product, packaging, price and promotion — to make a successful end product

KARACHI: A three-day business entrepreneurship conference, 'Ignite', was organised at the Foundation Public School’s (FPS) elementary campus. The summit was aimed at honing the entrepreneurial skills of students.

"After conducting interviews of 60 teams that applied from four different schools, 25 teams were selected for participation in Ignite," said project coordinator Ali Akbar.

The teams were selected from four FPS campuses - North, Defence, A Level and Head Start - and each team had five students, belonging to O Levels or A Levels.

Ignite executive director Raeed Waseem told The Express Tribune that the event had developed entrepreneurial skills among young students. Waseem, who is also an A Levels student at FPS, said that around 200 students between classes nine and 11 were involved in the event.

Ignite was based on product launching, which also included auction and bidding and making television commercials (TVCs) for one's products and attracting investors, said Waseem.

The first step for the teams was to select an industry around which they build their project on from the five available categories of food, fashion, technology, sports and services, said Akbar, adding that after selecting the industry, the team had to work on the four P's - product, packaging, price and promotion. The four P's needed to be planned out to make the end product successful, he added.

The teams also had to make designs relevant to the industry they had selected, including posters, brochures and logos. The last step for the students was to make a billboard for the industry they were targeting and set up a booth for the open market.



"We introduced our own Ignite Currency (IC) for the first time so that the judges could visit the stalls and buy the product of their choice," Akbar explained.

The scorecard calculation was done after the open market, on the basis of which, the delegates were given awards. Students were awarded for 'Best Idea', 'Best TVC', 'Best Designing', 'Best Booth Display' and 'Best Delegation'.

Students from the North campus, who selected the category of sports and medic and publications as a sub-category, developed a channel for their product. "We designed a sports channel, 'SporDallari', which will give news, develop talk shows and informative shows on sports," said head delegate for the team, Aun Muhammad.

Our institution provided us with a great platform to enhance and improve our business skills, shared a delegate, Misbah Shahid.

Corporate dinner

TVCs produced by the delegates for their products were projected to the audience present at a corporate dinner held on the second day of the three-day Ignite event on Saturday.

The students had to make a TVC for their product on the second day of the conference. "The length of the commercials was from 120 to 180 seconds and all the editing and shooting was done by the students themselves," explained Akbar.

The best TVC award was won by the delegates of the team that presented a TVC on a restaurant, shared Waseem.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 14^th, 2016.