LEMON today is well known name in the space of entrepreneurship education and start-up mentoring-incubation over last 4 years. It has been an outcome of co-creation and right intentions to support the art of creation, innovation and ideas. It’s an offbeat initiative for very different breed of people who aspire to be entrepreneurs and innovators. The foundation of the LEMON brand lies in the fact that it is an attempt to bring positive change in education and provide a fresh new pedagogy for learning in new age times. LEMON is happy to celebrate 100 media stories which proves its impact and brand value.
Lemon is a brand createdwith the vision of generating entrepreneurs out of innovators by rendering them a good incubation and nourishment to develop a successful business plan. LEMON was founded by Mr. Deepak Menaria in the year 2013 with an aim to mentor youth on fresh ideas and push the envelope for entrepreneurship and creation. LEMON IDEAS has been on forefront of working on crazy ideas, support entrepreneurs and incubate-fund the right projects. Through his experiences he outlined a story which was published in TOI about 16 predictions for start-ups in 2016. After learning from failures, experimenting and realizing the need for Indian entrepreneurs, a team of eminent entrepreneurs and expert professionals joined hands to create a new age ‘GURUKUL’ christened as LEMON School of Entrepreneurship (LSE) in 2015. Its asocial initiative and selfless (~stupid) thought of harvesting the ignited minds for generation of brute force with unique ideas commenced with LSE. Now LEMON comprises of five in-house/incubated start-ups while it have a fair record of mentoring of about20+ start-ups pan India and Lemon team have contributed actively towards nurturing more than 200+ entrepreneurs over past 04years.
CEO@10K was the first LEMON workshop that took place in initial months of LEMON formation on Nov.16th, 2013 which comprised of 15 budding entrepreneurs having a dream, a dream of start-up, of which the mentor Deepak Menaria narrowed down the search of solitary ideas to two. He funded the youngsters for their start-up, with the hard work and worships of the team the start-up became a great success.This story was excellently covered and published by many media houses. The initial successful start-up of LEMON was KHICHADIWALA by Manish Khanchandani and Sagar Bhajani which aimed tore-brand the culture of fast food with a mission to serve branded Indian Khichadi in various flavours at reasonable prices with no harmful preservatives unlike other options available in the market. Their innovative recipes have been health certified by the dietician. This news went widespread with conjoined coverage by Dainik Bhaskar on January 25th, 2014 and Your Story on April 16th, 2015. The major coverage LEMON earned in year the 2015 were for food industry start-ups by TOI on January 2nd& 18th, 2015 and for creation of entrepreneurs from youth by Patrika Indore and Your Story. The rise of Lemon School of Entrepreneurship on May 25th, 2015 provided open access/platform to those who wished to Learn & explore about what it takes to be an Entrepreneur. It gave Experimental Entrepreneurship Experience to the young aspirants. This sui generis idea of Mr. Deepak proved to be alluring to mass media and digital world and was covered in one of his interview with Hybiz, The Hitavada, Patrika, Business India, The First mail, Business Standard, The Hindu and TOI. Lemon also organised a start-up event on 20th June 2015, where it provided a platform to local entrepreneurs’ food and e-commerce domain to exhibit their business plan. After initial setup LEMON has provided virtual incubation and mentored various start-ups like Orange and Orange– an initiative from Nagpur which deals in oranges, orange bouquet/gifts & orange based products, Prozene Bangalore based start-up solving the problem of Employability by stitching together a technology solution around Live projects, Crowd sourcing of solutions for business/community and Co-curricular activities, Discover Dollar is Bangalore based start-up was proud winner of innopreneurs 2015; it helps retailers to detect and resolve overpayments and revenue leakages like pricing errors, missed allowances and rebates, duplicate payments etc by analyzing all data sources including unstructured data like emails and contracts, Fix It-a Mumbai based start-up providing‘Everyday’ house-hold maintenance services to its customers, Superpandit- start-up simplifying the process of worship with the unique solution of the problems of Mumbaikar’ which provides Eco-Friendly Ganesh idols online with free home deliver, L’il Footprints, Kabadiwala, Your Vision and many more..
Lemon has wide outreach in terms of educational fairs and guest lectures aiming Youth empowerment through entrepreneurship, such an event were covered by The Hans India on 16th September, 2015 and TOI covered a story about Incubators and accelerators. LSE successfully organised a 4 day workshop on spirituality on 22nd October,2015 by Prabodh Yelne being the mentor, Talk on start-up by Mr. Prajakt Raut on 4th july’15 and importance of books being source for information by Venkatesh Iyer on 24th Dec’15.
LSE takes efforts in creating Entrepreneurs. The mentors in LSE like Mr. Nitin Gujarathi- Chair Technology, has a golden experience of dealing with different people around the globe in Technical and Non-Technical background take care of providing quality guidance to aspiring candidates and make their learning through on field performance. LSE conducts two programmes on yearly basis i.e.; Business training workshops and Experimental learning program. Mr. Deepak Menaria have been associated with many other mentors of VIA Entrepreneurship forum and together they’ve conducted events like launching helpdesk ‘Gurukul’ at VIA (a social cause) on 16th Nov,2016. Mr. Paul D’Souza, a Hong-kong based entrepreneur, owns ocean of knowledge about “Local specialities and Global Business” and he always guides the aspirants on and off the desk with his learnings and experience. Event such as Entrepreneurship theatre providing a synapse of art and creativity with entrepreneurship was conducted at Lemon on 22nd Nov 2016 which was under LSE cohort program. LSE being absolute of its kind uses different pedagogies as compared to the best B-Schools in the world, the Lemon Mentors Mr.Sanjay Arora and Mr.Mukesh Asher focuses on Marketing and Behavioral Science during E2I program. On these line first batch of “Year 2015” was passed out from LSE on 16th April,2016 and “Year 2016 ”programme was launched on 15th July’16, in which they worked on their start-up ventures in 4 months of the program.The non- Lemon mentors who have supportively guided LEMON entrepreneurs and employee in not only one but many horizons are the one who owes’ big gratitude on behalf of LEMON family. Such marked personalities includes, Anshu Gupta– The founder of Goonj (goonj.org), The “CLOTHING MAN OF INDIA” and the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2015 have paid visit to Lemon. Mr. Venkatesh Iyer- Founder of Goli Vada Pav guided entrepreneurs around town, in I-Summit-an event organized by Lemon on 21st Dec, 16.
In past few years LSE came up with building successful start-ups which work in adherence with one mother start-up Lemon Ideas. Some of them are Flying Penguins – a software design and development company that provides end-to-end development service for web, mobile & business automation development, Web Beta Solutions-provides Web Design, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Management, Graphic Design & IT services, CreatiFox– A one stop solution for graphic needs, Buzzinga Labs –Technology based start-up providing Virtual tours and virtual reality solutions and many more
Lemon have orchestrated its colossal events like I-Summit-(bringing entrepreneurs, students, professionals and budding entrepreneurs under one roof) organized twice, in years 2015-16; Innopreneurs (bring TALENTS, INNOVATORS, ENTREPRENEURS who have ideas and / or working on projects to make India better) on 12th Jan 2017; App-a-thon-The smart city Nagpur (unique platform for developers as their idea for making a smart app gets recognition) on 2nd Oct 2016 and Ideation camp organized in the year 2015, 2016 and 2017 (The Creation & Formation of IDEAS and Concepts via Immersion, Creative Brainstorming and Strategic Planning and at the vastness of Nature) was majorly co-ordinated with Mr. Deepak and Dr. Rajiv Roy- Chief Gardener, LSE. Mr. Roy is also associated with promoting Management education in Nagpur, highlighted in TOI January 17th, 2015.
Recently lemon start-up Buzzinga Lab buzzed around in various newsletters’ like TOI on 21st May’17, Navarashtra and Navabharat on 24th May’17 for its unique solution of providing customers a virtual tool. Also other start-upsof Lemon like Web Beta and Flying Penguins have received award under ‘Small Business Global Trade’ category on 25th May 2017. Recently Super Saturday is being conducted in Lemon Ideas for orientation of participants in Entrepreneurial aspect during which Mrs. Poonam Menaria- Mentor Self Awareness conducted a session on Who Am I?
The brand LEMON was started with the mission of creating 1000 entrepreneurs by 2020, thus working fingers to bone it started to boom in Nagpur, India working in synergy of the digital and social media partners Business World, Economic times, Business India, The Hindu,Navabharat, Navarashtra, Brand equity and India next media. Celebrating 100+ media stories of Lemon, as we’ve been in news for a hundred times we wish to thank all our media partners who have always responded greatly to work and by coherently covering our entrepreneurs, innovations and events brought LEMON to the masses. We take immense pleasure in paying gratitude to journalists who have published success stories about events and happening of LEMON not just from city but from wide arenas of like Rajasthan Patrika .
For full media stories visit here
Compiled By-
Nikita Samatkar
Intern, Lemon Ideas
