In 2007, when a bunch of students from IIT-Madras started the Centre for Innovation funded by the alumni of the 1981 batch, little did they know that it would grow as a platform for budding entrepreneurs and a place for people with ideas.
With auto, aero, astronomy, compvision, electronics, design and animation, ibot (robotics), webops (coding) and biotech clubs, CFI has around 300 student-members who walk in with their ideas and passion to see those ideas through.
Rohit Reddy, IIT alumni and founder and CEO, Desto, said, “I was with CFI when it started. I had an ambition to build things that fly. So we built an ornithopter. I am not from an aero background, but we did it.”
This zeal reverberates at the CFI Open House, an exhibition of CFI projects, held last weekend at the IIT-M Campus.
Anumanth Sarma, a student coordinator, said, “Each club has around three projects in various stages of completion here. Some NGOs or companies give their problem statements and we work on those too, and some are student projects.”
CFI gets a majority of its funds from the alumni. “They have extended support in technology and help them take their work elsewhere,” Reddy said.
Industry clients include Alstrut India, Kwik Soft Innovation, Paperman Pvt Ltd, Chennai Corporation, and NGO Vidya Sagar.
Some of the exhibits included hovercrafts and quadrotors, garbage segregation and compressing machines in prototype stage, a Vein Finder that makes detecting veins easier, various projects for a central building management system, alert system for hearing impaired, various devices and software to help autistic children and children with cerebral palsy (under the Team Sahaay that makes products to assist specially-abled people), projection mapping, scene classification, robots that carry loads in factories, and many more.
One exhibit includes parts of Raftaar, the formula racing car built from scratch by IIT-M students. The car itself is in transit from Germany, having just been a part of a competition organised by the Formula Student Association of Engineers. This is the team’s third year at FSAE. For most students at CFI, nothing is impossible.
As one alumni says, CFI was like “the Wild West. We had freedom to pursue something we were passionate about. A significant number of students from my batch are entrepreneurs.”
Mahesh Panchagnula, Co-curricular Advisor at IIT-M, said, “The fraction of CFI alumni who have start-ups is significantly higher than other alumni. CFI teaches them to be on their own with minimal mentorship.”
Reddy calls CFI a community. “It gives you a place, time, funding and guidance. And it teaches you to learn and fail and grow. As entrepreneurs it is all about facing the unknown. And CFI gives you that opportunity. It works on a non-incentivised organic model. Once you are done you feel like giving it back. You want to enable other students to have the same experience.”
This feeling of belonging to a larger community has assured that CFI will continue to be aided by those that have been helped by it. After all, what goes around comes around. And with several alumni taking a keen interest in CFI projects, it can be assured that many more ideas will see the light of day.