Avtar I-WIN: creating flexi-careers
Publication date: 3 December 2015
Abstract
Subject area
Entrepreneurship.
Study level/applicability
MBA level – entrepreneurship courses, MA level – women empowerment issues, MBA – thriving in unstructured environments.
Case overview
Saundarya Rajesh, was the founder-president of AVTAR Career Creators (ACC) a talent consulting firm that offered solutions in training, hiring, selection process outsourcing and human resource information studies to over 400 clients. The case describes the progressive journey of Saundarya as an entrepreneur in discovering and exploiting opportunities as they arise at different points of her career. Saundarya did pioneering work for creating flexi-career opportunities that included tools for Flexidizing® and Unbundling® of jobs. She has won many accolades for her work that included Tie Stree Shakti Awards 2011 for excellence in entrepreneurship, Cavinkare's Chinnikrishnan Innovation Award for Outstanding Entrepreneurship 2011 and India Today's Business Wizards of Tamil Nadu, 2011. Saundarya was happy with the fact that there were 23,000 women currently on the AVTAR I-WIN network and there were 13-15 lakh more women whose talent could be harnessed. She dreamt of ensuring that 1.2 million Indian women, who had dropped out of the workforce in the past 10-15 years, could be brought back to contribute productively. While there appeared to be an acceptance of the flexible working concept among the potential employees and employers, several questions about the future potential of such a work-force needed to be answered.
Expected learning outcomes
To understand the factors that constitute entrepreneur's alertness such as personality traits, social networks and prior knowledge. To understand the importance of entrepreneur's alertness for identifying business opportunities. To understand types of entrepreneurial opportunities. To understand the opportunity identification triad: recognition, development and evaluation. To understand how to develop a business model in under-defined contexts.
Supplementary materials
Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to express our heartfelt thanks to Ms Saundarya Rajesh and her team at AVTAR I-WIN for all their Support in developing this case. Their timely help with providing us with primary information and helping us understand the genesis and development of the flexi-careers opportunities and the business case for exploiting the idea has been remarkable.
Citation
Raghavan, S. and Dastidar, S.G. (2015), "Avtar I-WIN: creating flexi-careers", , Vol. 5 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/EEMCS-05-2014-0142
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2015, Emerald Group Publishing Limited