AI, livelihood, health: test your business creativity with Edition 186 of our weekly quiz!
This insightful feature from YourStory tests and strengthens your business acumen! Here are 5 questions to kick off this 186th quiz. Ready?
Lateral Sparks, the weekly quiz from YourStory, tests your domain knowledge, business acumen, and lateral thinking skills (see the previous edition here). In this 186th edition of the quiz, we present issues tackled by real-life entrepreneurs in their startup journeys.
What would you do if you were in their shoes? At the end of the quiz, you will find out what the entrepreneurs and innovators themselves actually did. Would you do things differently?
Check out YourStory’s Book Review section as well, with takeaways from over 355 titles on creativity and entrepreneurship, and our weekend PhotoSparks section on creativity in the arts.
Q1: Travel services
Travelers plan extensively for their vacations, which are highly emotional experiences. But many travel platforms still offer limited personalisation and fragmented services. How can this problem be fixed?
Q2: Woolen material
Coarse wool is regarded as unfit for traditional textile use. How can this material be used for other applications, and also generate livelihood for sheep-rearing communities?
Q3: Women’s health
Period poverty remains a major barrier for young girls in impoverished communities. How can this lack of access to sanitary products be addressed, along with proper awareness and dignity?
Q4: Gardening
The gardening market in many emerging economies is fragmented between agri-stores and roadside nurseries. How can structure and quality be introduced for gardening at scale?
Q5: Gray-collar employment
Many roles in healthcare, hospitality and construction sectors lie vacant, while a large proportion of graduates in these domains also remain unemployed. How can the needs of industry and job aspirants be effectively addressed?
Answers!
Congratulations on having come this far! But there’s more to come – answers to these five questions (below), as well as links to articles with more details on the entrepreneurs’ solutions. Happy reading, happy learning – and happy creating!
A1: Travel services
Co-founded by Sahil Sharma, travel-tech startup Rimigo offers an AI-driven end-to-end vacation planning solution. Users simply specify their destination and vacation preferences, and the platform generates detailed itineraries and recommendations for flights, accommodation, dining, and activities.
"With advances in AI, we now have a unique opportunity to create a truly personalised vacation planning experience," says CTO Shubham Chintalwar. Read more here about how the startup’s offerings and how it has secured $550,000 in pre-seed funding.
A2: Woolen material
Led by Prerna Agarwal, Shwetambara Ujjain, and Danish Choudhary, Samakhya Innovative Solutions (SIS) generates value from coarse sheep wool produced by pastoral communities of Rajasthan. Considered unfit for traditional textile applications, coarse wool instead excels as sustainable insulation for the construction industry.
It offers a natural alternative to carcinogenic glass wool, rock wool, polystyrofoam, and thermofoam. Read more here about how SIS has also revived sheep rearing as a profitable enterprise for over 500 pastoral families, while providing insulation material for a range of organisations.
A3: Women’s health
Co-founded by Ishu Shiva and students from the University of Edinburgh, Sanitree blends education, sustainability, and employment to tackle period poverty. Its reusable sanitary pads have reached over 11,500 women across India and overseas.
The pads are manufactured at a unit in Jaipur. Read more here about how student volunteers in Edinburgh handle activities like grant writing, website management, social media, awareness campaigns, and fundraising.
A4: Gardening
Founded by Siddhant Bhalinge, Ugaoo is a gardening brand that reconnects urban citizens with plants through education, products and services. It offers care guides, tutorials, and beginner-friendly content to demystify gardening.
Its catalogue features over 1,500 types of items such as plants, seeds, tools, fertilisers, lifestyle accessories, and sustainable gifts. Read more here about its logistics chain and quality control systems, and how it targets the mass market as well as over 120 corporate clients.
A5: Gray-collar employment
Founded by Vivek Sinha, Emversity is an employability-focused, skill-based training and recruitment platform for grey-collar roles. The openings are in sectors like healthcare, travel, hospitality, education, and construction.
For example, roles include nurses, lab technicians and paramedics in the health sector, and food and beverage services in the hospitality sector. Read more here about its employer-sponsored stipend model, industry co-designed curriculum, and Centres of Excellence for capacity building.
YourStory has also published the pocketbook ‘Proverbs and Quotes for Entrepreneurs: A World of Inspiration for Startups’ as a creative and motivational guide for innovators (downloadable as apps here: Apple, Android).