Services, automation, credit: Test your business creativity with Edition 247 of our weekly quiz!
This insightful feature from YourStory tests and strengthens your business acumen! Here are 5 questions to kick off this 247th 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 247th 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: Marine inspection
Surveying a seabed, watching a stretch of coast, or checking a marine pipeline calls for extensive operations by manual crews. Where is the technology opportunity for an entrepreneur here?
Q2: Elder care
People often struggle to find dependable help for their elders and infants. This leads to frustration and stress for working couples. How can this problem be solved?
Q3: Charging drones
Charging drones between trips requires human intervention to swap batteries and launch them again – but this can be costly for frequent uses of drones. How can this issue be addressed?
Q4: Credit for women entrepreneurs
Access to formal credit remains a barrier to women entrepreneurs, many of whom face rejection from lending institutions or require a male co-applicant. How can this gap be resolved?
Q5: Fresh milk
Milk can take seven to ten days to reach consumers through the traditional supply chain, due to requirements of processing, packaging and retailing. How can this be reduced to deliver truly fresh milk?
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: Marine inspection
Founded by Nikunj Parashar and Mridul Babbar, Sagar Defence Engineering provides uncrewed boats that can be smaller than regular boats, stay out longer, and work in harsh conditions. Its unmanned AI-enabled marine surface vessels can be used for survey, patrol and data collection.
The autonomous navigation system also operates unmanned aerial vehicles for monitoring the territory. Read more here about the company’s applications in defence, oil and gas, inland waterways, and oceanography, and its fundraise from ONGC, IDBI and Skegen.
A2: Elder care
Founded by Priyanka Rastogi and Arun Mahendran, EzyHelpers provides home care for elders and has trained and placed more than 2,000 caregivers. The company’s services now span multiple categories beyond caregiving for elders – baby care, housekeeping and gardening.
EzyHelpers runs a hostel called ‘Nest’ for helpers to get trained and oriented before taking up their first placement. Read more here about how more than 1,000 families across 400-plus residential societies have used its services.
A3: Charging drones
Founded by Ankit Mishra , AlgoFET operates an integrated drone station stack covering autonomous docking, battery management, and high-power charging. Its embedded electronics, firmware and cloud-based monitoring enables precision landing and battery management for drone fleets.
This helps to patrol a perimeter or inspect a pipeline continuously, and provide precise analytics to operators. Read more here about its activities at ARTPARK of IISc, and its customers in defence, agriculture, logistics, and infrastructure inspection.
A4: Credit for women entrepreneurs
Founded by Pallavi Shrivastava, fintech company Progcap has launched the ProgShakti initiative to help women-led small businesses access credit. It is built around a “3 Cs” framework — credit, community and commerce.
To assess credit-worthiness, it conducts KYC and financial checks, assesses the applicant’s understanding of the business, and visits its premises for validation. Read more here about how genuine owner-operators can access loans of up to Rs 10 lakh without a male co-applicant, and how over Rs 10,000 crore has been provided in credit to women entrepreneurs.
A5: Fresh milk
Founded by Mannu Jee and Aman Jee, Milkvilla is a dairytech startup whose supply chain runs from the farm to cooling, the delivery hub, and then the customer. It claims the entire hyper-local process can be reduced to about 12 hours for milk sourced close to urban customers.
It uses a special milk collection vehicle equipped with cooling, and a testing infrastructure that currently serves more than 10,000 active customers. Read more here about its app-driven prepaid subscription model, and its expansion to categories like paneer, ghee, and peda.
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.