The Bhutanese Leading the way.
The Bhutan innovation Teck week, an event that was aimed at providing unique opportunity for young aspiring entrepreneurs to showcase and launch their ideas concluded today.
The week long program, that began on November 12, was organized by Entrepreneurship Division, Department of Employment and Human Resources (DOEHR), Ministry of Labor and Human Resources (MOLHR).
The objective of organizing such an event is to provide unique opportunity for young aspiring entrepreneurs to showcase their ideas and launch ideas into products. The program is focused on the idea stage in BioTech, FinTech, EduTech, CleanTech, MediTech, RoboTech, AgriTech and Artificial Intelligence.
Although a total of 83 youth registered for the program, only 50 turned up. 21 participants pitched their ideas of which only 17 were selected. Out of 17, only 15 pitched their idea for the final round.
According to MOLHR officials, “Tech Week is organized to provide an experiential, risk free, safe learning platform to explore what it takes to be a startup, where you stand in your entrepreneurship journey and networking with diverse group of participants including best of the best mentors. The program will also help participants to take their idea into the market or meet their potential co-founders”.
Various ideas such as rice transplanting machine, urine bank, E agriculture and air cooler among others were pitched.
Roshan and the team with Air Cooler (AC) was awarded the first prize of Nu 1 lakh, Deepak Ghalley and his team with rice cultivating machine was awarded second position with Nu 75, 000 and Penjore Dorji and the team who came up with natural color pigment was awarded Nu 50,000 at third place.
The Director said, “Entrepreneurship is considered as the key activity to resolve the issue of unemployment”.
He said, “No matter how much money we have, if we don’t have passionate people who come up with some brilliant ideas, we cannot address the issue of unemployment”.
He also said, “If we don’t have enough jobs, we need job creator. The current scenario is that we have more job seeker but less job creator. So, we need people like you to create more jobs for our youth”.
He added, “In the past when startup weekend was organized, not much people participated but we are overwhelmed by the number of participants who turn up for such program now and also by the brilliant ideas they offer”.
