Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), NITI Aayog successfully completed two month long and a first of its kind, digital skills and an exclusive entrepreneurship ATL Tinkerpreneur summer bootcamp held across the country.

Designed for high school students across the nation, ‘ATL Tinkerpreneur’ saw a record-breaking 9000+ participants (including 4000+ girl participants) across 32 states and 298 districts.

The Bootcamp witnessed participation from 820 ATLs, 50+ live expert speaker sessions were conducted with over 4.5 lakh views and imparted 30+ digital and entrepreneurial skills.

‘Tinkerpreneur’ – the name derived from the phrase ‘enabling students to tinker from the comfort of their homes and become an entrepreneur this summer’ was a bootcamp focussed on cultivating a hands-on innovative mindset among students.

Spread across a span of 9 weeks from 31^st May 2021 to 1^st August 2021, ‘ATL Tinkerpreneur’ enabled the participants to develop a business idea and create an end-to-end strategy for setting up a new venture. Over the course of the bootcamp, the participants learnt the required digital skills, created and developed a business model around a digital product, generated a marketing plan, developed/established an online store, learnt business finance and culminated it by presenting their pitch deck in front of Industry experts.

Students along with their ATL in-charges were mapped in small groups with Mentors-of-Change. All those who registered got access to a repository of digital and entrepreneurial curated learning resources, do-it-yourself content, simple assignments etc. to empower the participants to create their own digital products and ventures.

Emphasising on inculcating a hands-on and innovative mindset during the finale session, Mission Director AIM, NITI Aayog Dr Chintan Vaishnav said “The whole bootcamp was designed to instil an innovative mindset as well as to help students go from an idea to a venture in a short time, by trying-failing-and trying again. We wanted them to experience both the creation of a solution as well as a business around it. As they learnt these skills by 'doing', we expect these learnings to stay with them throughout their life's journey.”

Speaking during the virtual finale session of the bootcamp, Founder Infosys Mr. Narayana Murthy said, "A leader has to be a uniter and not a divider. The most important responsibility of a leader is to raise the aspiration, confidence, energy, and enthusiasm of the people and teammates around. The leader must do whatever is necessary to make a person feel an inch taller in the leader's presence.”

He further added, addressing young innovators, “if you become a leader, ensure that people that come to you leave with higher confidence in them. His or her main job is to craft a vision that is aspirational and individually rises above region, religion, caste, and economic clauses. A leader has to imagine something that nobody has dreamt of, moving towards this requires a lot of sacrifice, hard work, discipline, deferred gratification, confidence, hope & enthusiasm. Such attributes come to the people when the followers trust the leader."

Meanwhile, participants leveraged the knowledge and hands-on involvement of 650+ Mentors (including 180+ women mentors), inculcated and applied their inputs and improved upon their ventures. With inputs from industry leaders, regular sessions by guest speakers in 6 regional languages (Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada) and a positive environment provided students a thorough introduction to entrepreneurship along with an opportunity to network with fellow innovators from across the country.

An exclusive Tinkerpreneur web portal was also created with a curated 9-week content for self-paced learning. The portal enabled the students to submit quizzes, assignments and enabled the mentors to review student assignments and share feedback.

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DS/AKJ