The International Institute of Information Technology-Bangalore (IIIT-B) has been at the forefront of research related to digital technologies and promoting innovation for the larger public good. Backed by the research prowess of the Institute, the IIIT-B Innovation Centre has been bringing together academia, innovation and entrepreneurship while also fostering collaborations with the government and the industry.
Dr. Lakshmi Jagannathan, CEO at the Innovation Centre, believes incubation doesn’t happen inside the four walls of an incubator, but outside where connections are built. “If start-ups can find market, everything else will fall into place,” says Jagannathan who feels incubators can play a crucial role in this.
With The Hindu she shares her views on how the Innovation Centre differentiates itself, why Bengaluru is poised to become the deep tech hub of the country and how corporates can help by opening up their R&D labs for deep tech startups.
How does IIIT-B Innovation Centre bring together IIIT-B’s strengths to build a robust deep tech ecosystem?
The Innovation Centre’s mandate is to support start-ups that have innovative ideas, bring in mentors and market access for them, and facilitate IP within the campus for translational research possibilities. It is not called an incubation centre, because we also believe in innovating and working with corporates to facilitate innovations.
Anything to do with digital is IIIT-B’s sweet spot. Innovation Centre is very focused on supporting innovations and start-ups in the digital space. That is one part.
Secondly, IIIT-B has about 8-10 research labs/centres of excellence, managed by faculty and supported by various governments including the Government of Karnataka and the Government of India. We want to work closely with them to see how we could align with their work, get them to mentor startups, and commercialise research.
Incubation at the Innovation Centre falls into three buckets. One is pre-incubation, a six-month-long customer discovery programme for early-stage startups. The second is incubation, which is for two to three years. It offers deeper engagement where we help startups with mentorship, technology support, customer access and investor connections, small funding through grants and government programs, and so on. Acceleration is for late-stage startups. We help them to get more business and money.
A bit about some of your programmes
We are an incubation partner for the RBI Innovation Hub, and we are running a pre-incubation programme for about 30 fintech start-ups for them.
We are also doing a pre-incubation programme for 6-7 start-ups that are building digital solutions for Farmer Producer Organisations (FPO) in Karnataka.
With Nimhans we are trying to do incubation. We launched a programme called the Deep Engagement and Enrichment Program for Agile Startups (DEEPAS) in the area of mental health and brain health. We are now onboarding about 5 to 6 start-ups who will closely work with Nimhans. They have agreed to bring their clinicians to work with the startups for testing and validating ideas. Some of these solutions are going to be validated in the Karnataka Brain Health Initiative (KABI) clinics. In the next stage, we want to get problem statements from Nimhans and identify innovators who can build solutions for them.
We did two acceleration programmes last year. One is on digital health where we supported about 12 start-ups. Another one was on machine intelligence and automation and was called Industry 4.0. This may be one of the first few industry-led programmes of this kind. We have partnered with the Bangalore Chamber of Industry and Commerce for the same and all the members including TVS and Bosch among others agreed to mentor startups.
Start-ups come to the Innovation Centre for primarily two things – money and market. We at the Innovation Centre see if we can bring in market for them. This market could be companies like TVS to Bosch or hospitals like Nimhans. If start-ups can find the market, everything else will fall into place.
How does the Innovation Centre differentiate itself?
In India, there are close to 1000 incubators. In Bengaluru alone, there are 100-plus incubators.
Bengaluru is in a very good position to become the deep tech ecosystem for the country. Deep tech requires a lot of intensive R&D, academia, patents, and is a long haul. Due to this, academia is slowly coming to the limelight. Start-ups understand that they need research scholars and academia who can work with them to develop the IP required to build deep tech.
The kind of ecosystem in Bengaluru for deep tech is vibrant. There is pro bono mentorship available which you do not see elsewhere. And with digital pervading every aspect of life, IIITB is probably the only institute in Bengaluru which can leverage it to its full extent.
At the Innovation Centre, we are talking to corporates interested in innovation and wanting to work with startups. If we have to differentiate and add value to startups, it will be only through finding business for them. Capital is not a major problem today. Market access, market validation, customer connect and the ability to do real business are going to matter. So can we bring these markets to incubators is what we are looking at broadly.
What’s the share of IIIT-B startups at the Innovation Centre and how do you look at translational research opportunities?
IIIT-B start-ups at the Centre would be around 1-2%. We also map research from IIITB to external start-ups.
Start-ups want money, and business, they want to scale fast. On the other side, maybe a professor who’s predominantly interested in research and not business-savvy. It’s an ideal fit to bring them together. If there’s research available within the campus at a POC or MVP stage, why reinvent the wheel?
Today there are VCs who are looking at co-creation opportunities. There is increasing interest in academia among startups and investors. Such opportunities were not available for academia years back. With deep tech gaining prominence, research-to-commercialization is picking up.
We are now looking at corporates who want to work with us for digital technology innovation in areas which can create societal impact. That could be health, education, sanitation, hygiene, women empowerment…
Around 70% of India is in the rural areas. And there are fundamental problems to be solved around water, health, sanitation, hygiene, women, then environment, pollution, sustainability, and so on. This also makes it a very good market for society-centric technological solutions.
MSME is another interesting area for us. A lot of MSME companies are building smart solutions for smart manufacturing, but they may not be very good at communication, PowerPoint or Excel. Whereas start-ups are very tech-savvy. We wanted to marry the two. So that is one more thing on our priority.
What are some areas for improvement for startups and incubators?
One big challenge is early validation and traction.
Today, a lot of government money is available for start-ups at a very early stage. Grants from DST, DBT, Elevate and so on cumulatively add up to ₹50 lakhs. With that you build till the MVP stage, but after that money becomes scarce and a lot of startups struggle. So, you need to make sure that in the early stage itself, you talk to the customer and validate your idea.
For example, many are building healthcare solutions without even talking to doctors or clinicians. Finally, when they take it to market, it will be rejected. Out of the 60 solutions we ran by NIMHANS for validations, they said only eight were relevant to them. That means there are 52 guys who have been building something that is not going to be used by those in mental health or neuro fields. A lot of time and resources are wasted.
The second part is making use of existing infrastructure and research facilities. The government of Karnataka has now come up with a very good GCC policy. Of the 1700-plus GCCs in India, many are in Bengaluru, and they have very good research capabilities. If these GCCs and corporate R&D labs can open up their research capabilities for start-ups, the latter’s design, prototyping, small batch manufacturing and so on can happen at these facilities.
One of the biggest challenges today for deep tech is access to R&D facilities. They don’t need capital infrastructure; they need access to capital infrastructure. A huge portion of money from government schemes for incubators is marked for creating capital infrastructure. This is not required.
Instead of everyone creating a lab, we must have a centralized facility which all start-ups can use; Or reach out to corporates who are ready to open up their facilities. I believe corporates are ready to open up, and with this, a large problem of deep tech start-ups could be solved. Many of them, especially those building products or hardware, go to either China or Taiwan for chip designs, small-batch manufacturing and so on. But these facilities are available with corporates here. A lot of corporates are also now looking at how they can work with start-ups as it aligns with their business. We must make use of that.
Incubators must also be more proactive in getting out and building more connections. Incubation doesn’t happen inside four walls, it happens outside.
