IEEE Entrepreneurship in partnership with the IEEE Young Professionals Sri Lanka organized a 3-day IEEE Entrepreneurship 101 Workshop in Colombo during June 6-8, 2025.  The workshop began with two online sessions prior to the workshop to orient the participants towards the goals of the workshop and ideating for an innovation to take to the market based on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. 22 enthusiastic participants from a wide geographical distribution in Sri Lanka attended the workshop.  The content of the workshop included presentations on ideation and opportunity analysis, business models and finance for start-ups, digital marketing (Dr. Subodha Charles), taking ideas to market and soft skills. Ms. Vindya Wijesinghe from the National Innovation Agency and Mr. Nalinda Atapattu from the Intellectual Property Office also presented the sources of financing and the importance of IP for start-ups respectively. Group work was an integral part of the workshop and as was a panel discussion on the last day with Sri Lankan entrepreneurs who shared their experiences in starting successful companies in Sri Lanka.  The participants formed 5 teams as below to pitch their innovations:

1. Agrinova - Agritech

2. ArchiTrek - Tourism

3. PeppAR - Foodtech

4. SkillBridge - Edutech

5. Teachme - Edutech

Their final pitch in the form of videos were judged by a panel and the PeppAR team consisting of Kenuka Karunakaran, Navodya Jayasundara, Layanthini Somasundaram, Rislin Riswan and Karushna Jeyakumar was judged to be the winner of the pitch competition – congratulations!

Many thanks to Ken Stauffer and the IEEE Entrepreneurship team in the US and Heshan Mallawarachchi and the IEEE Young Professionals team in Sri Lanka who meticulously planned this activity over 6 months.   Photo courtesy of IEEE Sri Lanka Section.