IIT bags the British Council HSBC Youth Enterprise Award for second consecutive year

Continuing the winning streak, a student from the Informatics Institute of Technology was adjudicated the winner of the British Council HSBC Youth Enterprise Awards ( YEA) which concluded recently. This was the second time in succession a student representing IIT had won this prestigious title.

The proud winner of this year’s competition was Sadeepa Tharinda Basnayake who is a current student at IIT. Tharinda had won this year’s award for his project titled “FastMed” which enables customers to obtain prescription medicine delivered to their doorstep through a subscription process.

The HSBC Youth Enterprise Awards (YEA) organised by British Council in partnership with HSBC is a Business Plan Competition which aims to recognize young entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka and support them to start their own businesses. The contest is open to Sri Lankan undergraduates, postgraduates and students aged 16 to 26 years representing universities, private higher education institutions, technical and vocational institutions and professional training bodies in Sri Lanka.

This year’s event which was held in early October at Orion City, Virtusa commenced the contest under the categories of Creative I n d u s t r i e s, Tourism and H o s p i t a l i t y, I n f o r mat i o n Technology and Telecommunication, Engineering, Agriculture, Education and Health, Power and Energy.

Commenting on his victory at the HSBC Youth Enterprise Awards, Tharinda said that as much as he is thrilled to be the winner of the HSBC Youth Enterprise Awards, his recent achievement is a motivation for him to focus on venturing into new business ideas.

“This was a programme to recognize and stimulate entrepreneurship, where we needed to develop an idea into a robust and feasible business plan, which would be looked at by a panel of judges who are all experts from the industry,” he said.

“There was a stringent screening process including interviews to review our business ideas in depth. The two key criteria the panel of judges was looking for were innovation and feasibility of the project. It had to be both viable and applicable and had to be one that could be marketed to the industry. Therefore our solution needed to be to be realistic and had to have a sensible approach to the financial aspect as well as its suitability. With all these criteria in place I was simply thrilled to be selected as the winner,” he said.

He further recommended that the guidance and the mentoring he had received from IIT has been a tremendous asset in developing the solution that helped him win this competition. He thanked his lecturers for being wonderful motivators in enhancing his talents and helping him hone innovative ideas and think out of the box.

He also pointed out that the course content and curriculum of his degree has also comprehensively covered so many key aspects in initiating solutions of this nature that it provided him with a great foundation and knowledge base in this instance.

“I strongly believe that I had an edge over the other candidates due to all of these factors. If not for the guidance and the knowledge I received studying at IIT, such a feat would have surely been a dream. I am grateful to all my lecturers at IIT who have guided me to bag this award,” he said.

Tharinda who is studying for his degree at IIT in Information Systems with Business Management is currently doing his internship at Unilever and is involved in several interesting projects. He finally noted that he hopes to one day commence his own business to introduce his winning product to the Sri Lankan and overseas markets.

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