The country's first public private partnership telecom business incubator, Startup Village, will be set up at Kinfra Park at Kalamassery near here. The agreement on taking 15,000 sq. ft space has been signed between Mr Sanjay Vijayakumar, CEO of MobME, and Mr S Ramanath, Managing Director of Kinfra.
National Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board (NSTEDB), Department of Science and Technology (DST), Technopark and MobME Wireless have joined hands to set up Startup Village – Indian Telecom Innovation Hub.
Startup Village will focus primarily on student startups from college campuses and would be modelled on Technology Incubators in the Silicon Valley. It aims to incubate 1,000 product start ups over 10 years and start the search for a billion dollar company from a college campus by turn of this decade.
Startup Village will create an ecosystem for start-ups to create breakthrough technologies for the global telecommunications industry. This would be made possible in association with leading companies in the telecom sector by setting up Telecom Innovation Zones, which bring the latest technology platforms and products to the startups in the incubator before it is released in the commercial markets. Mr Ramanath said.
Mr Sijo Kuruvilla, CEO of Startup Village, said that the first phase is expected to be inaugurated by February and the first batch would be inducted by April. “The campus will have full 4G network in the park, advanced telecom labs and also provide all services including legal, intellectual property, accounting, full-furnished offices, video-conference rooms, computers, phone lines, Internet, server space and virtual office services that are required for a student to start a company even while in college.”
Mr Sanjay Vijayakumar, CEO of MobME, said that with this initiative, the company aims to create a platform for the next generation of entrepreneurs to create enterprises and be job creators than job seekers. We aim to market Startup Village aggressively within the NRK community and hi-net worth individuals for their support to the startup ecosystem in Kerala, he added.