The Stanford Graduate School of Business has picked 45 Indian firms to kick-start its Seed Transformation Program in India, as a part of the Stanford Seed initiative. The comprehensive year-long program aims to bring the Silicon Valley way of innovation and entrepreneurship to up and coming enterprises. 

It includes eight months of immersive management training, devised specifically for the business leaders of these companies. The program will be conducted by Stanford GSB faculty and aided by local facilitators, with the ultimate goal of helping the leaders to come up with, and implement a thorough action plan for scaling their businesses and generating jobs in the next three to five years.

Elaborating on the rationale behind choosing India as the preferred destination for the program, Jonathan Levin, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Business said, “We selected India because of the high number of promising entrepreneurs with exciting businesses, and the potential for our Seed Transformation Program to support these businesses in their expansion. We see a significant opportunity to have a positive impact in the region by empowering and enabling business leaders who are focused on lifting India to greater prosperity.”

The program, which will run until 31 August 2018 will be carried out in five stages, which involve knowing the company, its products and customers, building a strategy, developing an action plan and implementing that plan, respectively. The companies that have been selected belong to diverse sectors like education, agriculture, energy, retail and product manufacturing, healthcare and financial services. They all have an annual revenue between US $150,000 and US $15 million, and are headquartered, legally registered, and currently operating within India.