New Delhi: Stanford University, a favourite among IT graduates, is for the first time organising an all India alumni, which would bring under one roof its former students and India's top IT heads including Azim Premji, Dr Naushad Forbes, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Nadir Godrej.

The meet, a platform to foster entrepreneurship opportunities, would be held in Bangalore on August 6. This would bring Stanford alumni together and offer a platform to share their experiences. This would be followed by a Global Entrepreneurship Conference on August 7, Nishant Berlia, Business Development Director (India), Stanford Asia Technology Initiative, said.

"This is our first year in India and after our wonderful experiences at our other sites in Shanghai and Tokyo, we are very excited to be here," Berlia said.

As per estimates, Stanford has around a thousand alumni in India. "Our alumni here represent a fantastic pool of people whom we feel should greatly benefit from interactions with each other in terms of gaining perspectives on new fields, looking for mentors or fresh new ideas and talent, in terms of gaining perspectives on new fields, looking for mentors or fresh new ideas and talent, or for the sheer intellectual experience," said Berlia.

"Moreover, in the future, for alumni around the world interested in India, we desire to develop this now to be an annual meet as a springboard to begin their expedition of India and gain crucial network also benefit Indian alumni who contribute towards this worldwide network," he said.

The theme of the conference is "Leading the World: Building a Technology Tiger", Berlia said. "The Stanford Silicon Valley Model stresses on synergy between universities and the industry and the conference would explore strategies for the very successful Indian technology cluster to move up the value chain and become a dominant tiger in world technology markets."

Key non-alumni speakers for the conference include Narayana Murthy (chairman, Infosys), S Ramadorai (CEO, TCS), Dr Kiran Mazumdar (chairperson & managing director, Biocon) and Ranjit Pandit (managing director - McKinsey India).

From Stanford, several key faculties including Prof John Bravman (vice provost) would be attending and addressing the meet, he said. Asia has become a very important region for Stanford and apart from conferences and alumni meets, Berlia said as part of their Asia Technology Initiative, every summer a select few, very highly qualified students, are sent to each of our sites to explore entrepreneurship in the Asian context and share the Silicon Valley culture.

"We have an exceptional team in Bangalore this summer who are working with a number of leading companies in Biotech and IT. This year has been a resounding success across Asia and we are very grateful for the incredible response of our alumni and Stanford friends in India," he added.

PTI