Google at its SMB-focused event in New Delhi on Wednesday announced two new initiatives for small and medium businesses in India - Digital Unlocked and My Business Websites. The event was helmed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who spoke about the power of the Internet to transform entrepreneurship. He also spoke of the importance of the Indian market with an eloquent quote, "If we solve a problem for India, we solve it for the world."
The initiative aims to offer opportunities for SMEs in India to attend courses, which are being offered by FICCI and will be certified from Google and the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad.
Talking about the training program, both offline and online programs will be personalized. Which means, under various topics offered in the Digital Unlocked program, a user can set their goals according to what’s right for them — whether they want to sell online, or they want to increase their online reach on social media, or simply get their work noticed. The course content of Digital Unlocked contains basic and beyond, to help its students build a foundation of digital skills to grow their businesses.
The problem with the current move towards a digital economy is that at the grassroot level, the skills to put digital technology to use is lacking. To help address this, Google’s digital skills training program is aimed at helping those SMBs make the most out of the online medium to advance their business.
“The Internet and digital technology will be an engine of growth for the Indian economy. Today, anyone can become an entrepreneur, a developer, or a creator, but it is important that they have the right tools and skills to digitize. We believe it is important for us to invest in training and equipping these individuals and small businesses to accelerate their journey of growth,” Sundar Pichai said.
Google also announced a joint research study with KPMG titled “Impact of internet and digitization on SMBs in India”. According to the study, 68 percent of the 51 million Indian SMBs are offline. The research also found that going digital could help SMBs increase their contribution to India’s GDP by 10 percentage points, raising it up to 46-48 percent by 2020. The study points out that “profits of digitally engaged SMBs grow twice as fast compared to offline SMBs.”
“Likewise digitally engaged businesses are able to grow their customer base significantly with 52 percent catering to customers beyond their home city versus only 29 percent offline SMBs. The report cites the lack of understanding of the benefits of digital technologies and technical skills as the essential reasons for being offline,” Google added.
What is Digital Unlocked and how it works
Under the Digital Unlocked program, SMBs can register themselves to learn digital skills which range from email, web, social, and mobile. The training program is carried out both online and offline and offers an option to personalize the learning. Other than web-based training program, the initiative is also offering an option to SMBs to attend real-time classroom training. As part of this feature, one could attend a one-day workshop that offers 8 hour of onsite class.
All that one needs to do is head to the Digital Unlocked website and register their SMB for the training program. As of now, Google will be offering 5,000 real-time training workshops across 40 cities in India over the course of next three years.
Other than the customizable online course, Google has also launched the Primer app, which is especially targeted at the mobile-first audience. The app has been designed to help those who cannot take out time for the everyday lessons and instead offers a more flexible approach for on-the-go learning. The free app for Android and iOS works offline and comes with support for Hindi and English languages with more languages like Tamil, Telugu and Marathi to be added in future.
What is My Business Websites
At the same event, Google also previewed My Business Websites- a free tool for SMBs to leverage the potential of the online world to expand their businesses. The tool helps them list themselves online and establish credibility. Using the tool, one can build a mobile friendly website for their business at the click of a button, precisely less than 10 minutes as claimed by Google. One only needs to put in the information while Google takes care of other details about website building and designing. The tool comes with support for nine Indian languages. The tool will be available for Google My Business users later in the year.
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