Startup Village phase 2 digital incubator launch on July 13

The Startup Village, country's maiden PPP model incubator launched as a trail blazing initiative four years ago, is all set for a national scale up with the phase II launch in a completely digital avatar on July 13.
The world's first digital incubator for student startups here, would be launched by Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan in Thiruvananthapuram, Startup Village officials said here today.
The Startup Village Phase 2, in tune with the Prime Minister's Startup India programme, will focus on creating an entrepreneurial culture amongst the country's five million engineering students by providing them a completely digital incubation framework, ranging from application for admission to teaching, mentoring and graduation.

Besides Vijayan, Infosys Co-Founder and Chief Mentor of Startup Village Kris Gopalakrishnan and Head of National S&T Entrepreneurship Development Board H K Mittal, will take part in the launch of the second phase, the officials said.
India needs more than one million new jobs a month for the next 20 years to employ all its youth and these jobs would mostly come from new startups if the right environment is created.
In a release, Gopalakrishnan noted that students, especially from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, were deprived of access to the best faculty and mentors from startup nerve centres like Bengaluru or Silicon Valley. "The digital transformation of the incubator would address the problem to a large extent," he said.

The Digital Incubator, which was built over the last 12 months, has already received more than 1,000 applications from students from across Kerala and towns like Vadodara in Gujarat and Vishakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh in its beta stage.
Started as an experiment in 2012, Startup Village is a pioneer in the incubation ecosystem in the country with its bold experiments and PPP structure, which allowed for fruitful government-industry-academia collaborations.