Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), a flagship initiative set up by the NITI Aayog, have two major announcements about its plan for fostering innovation and entrepreneurship in India in coming year of 2019.
5,000 startups from 100+ Incubators
In an event in Hyderabad on Friday, Mission Director of AIM, Ramanan Ramanathan, had told that AIM is setting up over 100 world class incubators in universities and institutions across India and each of these incubators will foster at least 25 to 30 startups every two years.
“We have launched 101 incubators of which 30 are operational already, and the rest will be operational by the end of next year,” he said, adding that funding of Rs 10 crore is being given to each incubator to provide necessary support to the startups.
AIM is expecting to have over 5,000 startups coming out of these 101 incubators over the next four years.
Through these incubators called as Atal Incubation Centres (AICs), AIM intends to support the establishment of new incubation centres that would nurture innovative start-up businesses in their pursuit to become scalable and sustainable enterprises.
Innovation Challenge for Helping Small Businesses
To inculcate innovation among small businesses in the country, AIM is also coming up with an initiative, which will be an Innovation Challenge, for innovators to come up with an idea that help small businesses in the country. The creative ideas shortlisted in this challenge wold then be funded in order to transform ideas into solutions.
A formal announcement of the innovation challenge program will made early next year.
“The number of researchers per 10 lakh population was very low at 222 in India, while the number was beyond 4,000 in countries like Sweden, Taiwan and South Korea,” said Ramanathan.
Set up as an umbrella organisation to align innovation policies between central, state and sectoral innovation schemes for innovation and entrepreneurship.
In this year, Atal New India Challenges and Atal Grand Challenges have already been launched this year by AIM to support technology-driven innovations and product creation for social and commercial impact, said the AIM website.
AIM also include establishment and promotion of Small Business Innovation Research and Development (AIM SBIR) at a national scale for helping SME/MSME besides startups, and rejuvenating Science and Technology innovations in major research institutions of the country like CSIR (Council of Scientific Industrial Research), Agri Research (ICAR) and Medical Research (ICMR) aligned to national socio-economic needs.
Source: IndianWeb2
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