New Delhi: Raising the bar for a holistic growth of entrepreneurs from MSME segment, entrepreneurs from the MSME segment came together on the platform of SME Learning Series – 10 city road-show event organized by Small Enterprise India(dot)com. Along with knowledge sharing, the event unleashed the potential of technology infrastructure and professional skill development for the community.

In an interactive panel discussion it came out unanimously that SMEs have to set efficient business processes in order to obtain innovative business models and the entrepreneur always have to look for enhancing his skill-set. As a challenge, startups must have to have clarity on their priorities. The panel discussion was moderated by Mr Faiz Askari, Editor, Small Enterprise India and attended by Mr Ashok Gupta, managing director, Velocis, Mr Santosh Ranjan, managing director Knowledge Horizon, Ms Aparna Bhatnagar, founder of Green&Good Store and Ms Nidhi Arora, Consultant on entrepreneurial issues.

The event also discussed the global opportunities with Government of Sharjah, Hamriyah Free Zone Authority that are available for Indian SMEs. Emphasizing on the scope globalization for Indian SMEs, Mr Saud Salim Al Mazrouee, deputy director, Hamriyah Free Zone Authority, UAE said, “Indian companies are an important and integrated part of our business. We have 25% of businesses in our Free Zone from India. We expect this number to grow further because of the high potential that an Indian startup and SME carries with itself.” However, commenting on the UAE’s business ties with Indian companies Mr Mazrouee also added, “Among the top five importing partners of UAE, India comes at number 2 after China. India and Sharjah trade reached 7.3 billion Dirhams.”

In order to help the businesses understand the potential of technology that can help them in collaborating with their peers in order to enhance the business decision making, Mr Alok Sharma of Cisco Systems highlighted the unique offering of unified communications. He said, “SMEs in today’s context have to do business smartly. Since the resources are limited, and business has huge scalability potential, the entrepreneur has to focus on saving time and cost in order to collaborate, expertise sharing and faster decision making. Unified communication technology solutions offers a great solution to this.” He however, also added that for CIsco, SMEs is a vibrant area and the company continues to focus on this vertical.

While emphasizing the importance of professional skill development for entrepreneurs and professionals who are working in a typical SME set up, Mr Santosh Ranjan, Managing Director of Knowledge Horizon stated, “Today, skill development is kept at very higher place. From entrepreneurs, business owners to managers or executive level professionals, we intend to provide a focused skill enhancement courses.”

Knowledge Horizon has introduced some innovative tools for learning and growing. Mr Ranjan also stated, “Hence, we continuously endeavor to offer our clients innovative learning methods in the most professional manner. To achieve that we continuously aim to innovate so that learning is simplified and concepts are demystified. Our philosophy is that knowledge and learning should be simple and easy to access.”

The SME Learning Series has also given a platform for start ups in order to recognize their success story. In the New Delhi event, one such success story was Green and Clean Store (dot)com.

Aparna Bhatnagar, founder of GreenAndCleanStore.com, highlighted her unique way of marketing his company’s core market communication of ‘responsible consumerism’.

The ten-city SME Learning Series 2011 went off successfully in New Delhi and Ghaziabad and the series is all set to attract SMEs in the remaining eight cities with it core focus of Educate-Innovate and Grow.