Gopalakrishnan Deshpande Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at IIT Madras will, over the next one year, help nearly 100 start-ups become commercially viable ventures, according to its CEO R Raghuttama Rao.
“The centre is the first of its kind in India where academic research in engineering, technology and science labs can be scaled up to commercial levels. This concept is available in countries like the US and Israel with a strong ecosystem in academic, technological, financial and legal points of view,” Rao told BusinessLine . “We will shortly announce a list of start-ups,” he said.
The centre, launched in January last year, is the brainchild of IIT Madras alumni Jaishree Deshpande, Gururaj Deshpande and Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan. Rao said after his joining as CEO and Shiva Subramaniam as Chief Innovation Officer, the centre started full fledged in the last four months. Rao was former MD and CEO of IMaCS, a management consultant firm, while Subramaniam had been with Tata Consultancy Services and also a member of the Tata Group Innovation Forum.
The centre will be co-funded for the next five years by the Deshpandes and Gopalakrishnan for a total of $5 million. It is similar to Deshpande Centres located at MIT (Cambridge, US), University of New Brunswick, Canada (The Pond-Deshpande Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship) and Queens University, Canada (Dunin-Deshpande Queens Innovation Centre).
Rao said the centre will reach out to start-ups at pre-incubation stage with research idea curated better, strengthened from proof of concept, giving customer validation, final idea of service and taking into incubation. As a start-up, there is over 90 per cent failure rate. Even if we bring it down by 10 percentage points, it is quite substantial, he said.
Out-of-box solutionsThe centre will work with business incubators and academic institutions of science, technology, management and design to help crystallise ‘out-of-the-box’ solutions that emerge from IIT Madras’ research labs based on scientific and technological work of faculty and research scholars, he said.
Science and technology institutes have been largely seen as a ‘teaching shops’ but are now reorienting themselves towards research. But, moving from research labs to market place is a major challenge. There is already an ecosystem in Chennai with the presence of IIT Research Park, and nearly 130 companies have been incubated from here. “We would like to strengthen this ecosystem further,” he said.