INNOVATION AMBASSADOR · MoE INNOVATION CELL & AICTE
Dr. CS Puja Shree Agarwal is an Innovation Ambassador certified at Foundation and Advanced level by the Ministry of Education's Innovation Cell and AICTE. She mentors grassroots and early-stage ventures, runs sessions for Institution's Innovation Councils, incubators and NGOs, and writes teaching cases from the ventures she works with. She holds a PhD in Commerce from Chaudhary Charan Singh University, is a Company Secretary registered with the ICSI as member A56253, and has cleared CA Inter, UGC NET Commerce, MBA Finance and M.Com. She has taught over 63,000 students since 2000, and 44 of her students hold All India Ranks in CS and CA examinations.
She is based in Vasundhara, Ghaziabad.
Invite her to speak Linked In Profile
STUDENTS TAUGHT SINCE 2000
ALL INDIA RANKS
AT A GLANCE
WHAT SHE IS INVITED FOR
IIC calendar activities, innovation and entrepreneurship sessions, idea-to-prototype mentoring, and judging for pitch and business plan events. She served as Vice President and Innovation Ambassador of the IIC at Jaipuria Institute of Management, Ghaziabad, running the calendar across consecutive semesters.
Business model and unit economics review, and financial planning for pre-revenue ventures.
As an NGO trainer and social enterprise mentor she runs training for women-led and artisan micro-businesses, focused on e-commerce onboarding — getting a handmade product from a village workshop onto a platform where it actually sells.
Training of trainers in entrepreneurship and skill development, and how to write a teaching case a journal will accept.
WHY HER
Most people who teach entrepreneurship have never run one. She co-founded Maatru Rasah, a social enterprise selling women-made artisanal foods — achaar, chutney, badi, papad, and GI-tagged Lakadong turmeric from the Jaintia Hills. It works with more than thirty women artisans across Uttar Pradesh.
So when she trains an NGO cohort on selling online, she is not working from a slide deck. Here is what she has watched go wrong, repeatedly.
An artisan quotes cost plus a small margin. That number does not survive contact with a platform. Commission takes fifteen to thirty per cent. Shipping is paid on volumetric weight, so a light pickle jar in a big protective box costs like a brick. Returns are absorbed by the seller. Photography costs money. By the time these land, a product priced at ₹250 was losing money at ₹250, and nobody noticed for four months.
A handmade product competes against a listing with white-background studio images. A phone photo taken on a kitchen counter loses even when the product is better. This is the single cheapest lever in the entire chain and it is the one most training programmes never mention.
A buyer who receives a slightly different jar than the photograph writes a review that costs more than the sale. Batch consistency is a production discipline, not a marketing problem, and it has to be fixed at the workshop.
Platforms settle in seven to fifteen days. The artisan bought raw material in cash weeks ago. The venture is profitable on paper and out of money in practice. This is the failure most livelihood programmes do not plan for, because the programme ends at "we got them listed".
AN IDEA SHE NAMED
Copyright Office, Government of India
Registration No. LD-20260180878,
Diary No. 25706/2024-CO/L,
Filed 14 August 2024,
Registered 27 January 2026.
Heripreneur is a term she coined and registered with the Copyright Office, Government of India. It names something the existing vocabulary misses.
An artisan makes. An entrepreneur builds. A heripreneur builds a business whose defensibility comes from inherited craft knowledge — a technique, a recipe, a regional method that cannot be copied by someone with more capital.
The distinction matters commercially, not just linguistically. Most advice given to artisan ventures pushes them toward scale and standardisation, which is exactly the direction in which they lose. A venture whose advantage is a Phulkari stitch or a Lakadong curcumin level does not win by producing more, faster, cheaper. It wins by proving provenance, holding a price, and refusing volume that would dilute the thing that made it distinct.
That reframing changes what you build: certification and traceability before capacity, and a price floor defended rather than a market share chased.