Swedish communication technology multinational Ericsson on Tuesday announced the launch of the Ericsson Innovation Awards India 2016, in association with Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT).
Students from 14 premier engineering institutes were invited to submit their innovation projects by Ericsson India with the objective of supporting and helping incubate the best three projects at IIT approved technology business incubators.
"These awards aim to encourage and promote the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship amongst students. By expanding the scale of these awards from seven institutes in 2015 to 14 engineering institutes this year, we want to reach out to more students and give them a platform to become successful entrepreneurs," Ericsson's India region head Paolo Colella said in a statement.
Ericsson has invited project proposals on the topics like web design, cloud computing, storage and networking, human-machine interface, embedded and hardware system design, Internet of Things, graphics and visualization, as well as research.
The company seek projects from all major institutes, including all IITs and IISc Bangalore, BITS Pilani, IIIT Gwalior, IIIT Delhi and Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in Varanasi.
Following the preliminary screening phase at their respective institutes, the student proposals from all the participating institutes will go through a shortlisting process, and the shortlisted projects would be financially supported for developing the initial prototype.
The winner will be announced at a mega event at IIT-Delhi in May on criteria such as degree of innovation, feasibility, usability, relevance, time to market and the overall impact/benefit to industry.
The jury will comprise of senior members from Ericsson, FITT and eminent industry experts.
"By helping students incubate their projects at IIT approved technology business incubators, we are not only encouraging students to come forward with their innovation ideas but are also helping them translate those ideas into viable businesses," said FITT MD Anil Wali.
