Synopsys Electronics Education and Research (Seer) Akademi, an academic initiative of the Worldwide University Program of Nasdaq-listed Synopsys Inc is aiming at incubating 100 start-up ventures in five years.
"India will import about $320 billion in electronics goods by 2015, from the present $32 billion, which means there is huge demand and production gap. There is a lot of scope to do a lot of things across the country in the field of electronics. We have been partnering Indian universities to jointly promote product development in the area of electronics. Our focus is to foster electronics talent and entrepreneurship and help students build a small electronics company. Seer Akademi will be providing micro-funding and grants till the students develop a prototype and then connect them with a venture capitalist. Our target is to incubate 100 such ventures in five years, leading to a lot of electronics-related problems being solved," said Srikanth Jadchela, chief executive officer, Seer Akademi.
Seer is also looking at collaborations with the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) sometime in the future to train students in the field of very large scale integration (VLSI) design and embedded systems. "India currently has 280,000 electronics engineers, while the demand for the next couple of years is expected to touch 500,000. Being an IIT-Madras alumnus, I would like to tie up with the IITs at some point in the future but IITs alone cannot produce 500,000 electronics engineers in such a short time. It is the grassroots that come up with the best solutions and that is the reason I went the reverse way and picked kids from the rural areas, whose proposals fit the criteria of setting up electonics companies.
Seer, which is in the process of setting up a centre of excellence in Ahmedabad at Ganpat University, is also planning to start its first Master of Technology in Electronics Entrepreneurship course from Gujarat in a year due to the entrepreneurship-conducive environment in the state. "We may start our first Master of Technology in Electronics Entrepreneurship course from Gujarat in a year's time. We are also looking at other universities from Gujarat to conduct this and other courses. While we have tie-ups with other regions, it has been observed that there is a higher percentage of entrepreneurs churned out from Gujarat than other part of the country. Moreover, the entrepreneurs are willing to invest, enterprising and the conditions in the state are also amenable to entrepreneurship," Jadchela added.
The academy has eight regional centres of excellence in Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Karnataka, Orissa, Punjab/Himachal and Gujarat.
