Vish Sahasranamam

About Vish Sahasranamam

Vish is a seasoned operating executive turned institution builder, scaling India\'s largest defence innovation platform and driving national-scale transformation by harnessing entrepreneurial innovation to orbit shift India’s industrial manufacturing sectors.Vish has 25+ years of experience in strategic business planning, product strategy, product management & marketing, strategic alliances, and business development. He has 7+ years of resident international work experience in Canada, USA, Sweden, Israel, and China. Over a career spanning professional and entrepreneurial pursuits, having launched new products, businesses, and startups, since 2015 onwards he forayed into a career in the establishment of everlasting institutions with sustainable and inclusive economic impact, population-scale capacity building, and national-scale technology driven transformation as their core purposes.Vish co-founded Forge in 2015 with the vision to transform India’s innovation economy in the industrial digital age, by building and operating a national-scale Open Innovation Network to catalyse talent, technology and ventures. Forge is a vertically integrated enterprise that operates in the entire innovation value chain covering talent transformation, technology labs, product innovation, startup incubation, venture acceleration, and seed investments - enabling transformation of India’s industrial sectors through programs with academia, industry, and government.Vish has played a pivotal role in building and scaling iDEX, the open innovation program launched by MoD that won the prestigious PM Award for Excellence in Public Administration and has emerged as the largest open innovation platform for India’s national defence and security. Vish delivers lectures at the National Defence College (NDC), Delhi India’s highest institute for learning - attended by senior officers from various arms of government, defence services, and friendly foreign countries on topics in the fields of Innovation and Technology Management & Capabilities Development in Strategic defence and security sectors. Vish serves on the Advisory Board of India’s first Strategic sector VC fund - MGF Kavachh, and of INDUS-X a joint initiative between DoD (USA) and MoD (India) to promote bilateral progress in nurturing a stronger strategic technology and entrepreneurship ecosystem. Vish received his PGDM (MBA) from IIM-Bangalore and his BE degree from CEG-Chennai (Anna Univ).

Experience

1. Co-founder & CEO

   Forge Innovation & Ventures

   Mar 2015 — Present · Coimbatore, IN

   Forge is the incubation enterprise launched by the Coimbatore Innovation & Business Incubator (CIBI), founded with the vision to create & catalyse innovation powered enterprises that harness the power at the intersection of hardware, software, and computing technologies to solve real-world problems, creating economic gains and delivering social impact. FORGE.FACTORY - the sq.ft incubator established in Coimbatore, includes HWjunction - the fully integrated lab for full-spectrum hardware innovation offering equipment, tools, and resources in computing (AI/ML), IoT, electronics, desktop fabrication, 3D printing, drones, and automation & robotics, to support the design, development, and testing of ‘manufacturing’ ready prototypes.FORGE offers holistic incubation services covering innovation labs, incubation grant, acceleration, and seed capital investment to transform innovative ideas into successful enterprises with potential for growth, impacts and profits. FORGE has achieved steady and significant progress in our vision to become a 360D Incubation Enterprise, built on the 3 pillars of our strategy and operations - value creation & delivery, revenue generation, and self-sustainable growth. Founded on this principle is our strategy to build a portfolio of programs to offer a comprehensive suite of services throughout the startup lifecycle from ideas to enterprises. We have adopted a 3-stage process for accelerating innovative ideas into enterprises, FORGE.FELLOWS - a pre-incubation program modelled in the form of an innovation/startup fellowship, followed by FORGE.FIRST - an incubation program aimed at fast-tracking product launch in the market and enterprise creation, and culminating in FORGE.FAST - a seed investment and business accelerator program.

Education

• Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

  PGDM

  2008 — 2010

• Vidya Mandir, Salem

  Higher Secondary School, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry

  1994 — 1996

• College of Engineering Guindy, Chennai

  B.E, Electronics and Communications

  1996 — 2000