CIIE to promote innovators

The Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, (IIM-A) will felicitate technology-based innovators selected through a nationwide competition on Saturday.

"Seven shortlisted technology based innovations will be evaluated by a panel of judges comprising scientists, technical professionals, academicians, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Apart from selecting the top three, the CIIE will offer incubation support to the most promising candidates. Those contesting include students, scientists and professionals working on wide ranging technology applications covering areas like nanomaterials, healthcare, global positioning systems, civil engineering and fermentation amongst others," said Somnath Chatterjee, coordinator, CIIE, IIMA.

The CIIE focuses on incubation related activities to develop a new perspective on enterprise creation. The centre has also received offers for technology commercialisation as well as mentoring hi-tech start ups. The process of incubation will come into full swing when a separate building for the CIIE becomes operational from May, 2005.

Last year, the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, had recognised CIIE as a technology based incubator offering partial funding for five years.

The CIIE was also chosen as one of the five institutions in the country to form the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) by the Wadhwani Foundation (set up by Romesh Wadhwani, an IT entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, USA).

Backed by the Foundation and in collaboration with other network partners, the CIIE plans to develop a long-term programme to nurture entrepreneurship development across India.

Amongst the NEN partners, CIIE will be the hub for research on entrepreneurship and case publication on new entrepreneurs and innovative enterprises.

Some of CIIE's proposed long term activities includes, collaboration with CSIR Labs to scout and support scientific entrepreneurship based ventures, technology exchange platform and web based mentoring and support to innovation based enterprises.

Innovator-entrepreneur matchmaking, collaborative incubation with technical institutions across the nation and greater involvement of students in entrepreneurship related programmes are also in the agenda.

Innovation, knowledge flows and capability building in hi-tech (electronics and IT) industrial clusters and research on various dimensions of innovation based entrepreneurship are amongst the research projects under progress.