President Pranab Mukherjee today said an incubation centre at each Navodaya Vidyalaya and an innovation lab in each district should be opened to promote entrepreneurship in the country.
"We should now aim for every Navodaya Vidyalaya to have incubation centres which enable and encourage children to take risks at an early age and for each district to have a community innovation lab," Mukherjee said on the concluding day of the 'Festival of Innovations'.
He said there is need to put in place policy initiatives for improving both innovation exposure and initiatives at government schools.
"While it may take time for all our wish list to fructify, the important thing to remember is that we have made a good beginning - we now need to build on this," Mukherjee said.
The President expressed concern over funding methodology for innovative start-ups and called for urgent need to rethink on design and structure of financial instruments to provide a fillip to innovation movement at grass root level.
Mukherjee said that the real concern for policy planners is the fact that much of the finance that is needed comes too late in the enterprise life cycle and a large number of ideas get aborted before becoming products or services.
"We, therefore, have to ask ourselves the question whether our policy and institutional arrangements for financing of innovation based start-ups need change and, to my mind, the answer would be an unequivocal 'yes'," he said.
The President said that in the last four decades he has spent more than a deacde and half in the policy making and his observations are not mere theories but are practical experiences gathered over years.
He said that there is continuous talk about India and the demographic dividend but at the same time, the unfortunate reality confronting us is that of growth without commensurate job creation.
"It is important, therefore, that we go beyond the traditional paradigms and create a system of entrepreneurship and innovation wherein our youth transform from job seekers to job creators," he said.
The President said that he is pleased that there has been an appreciable spurt in policy support for young start-ups in different sectors and a large number of e-commerce or agriculture based platforms have attracted venture capital support in the last few years.
He said that there are at least a million technology students passing out every year in the country and it is unlikely to get breakthrough unless investment is made in 10,000 - 20,000 ideas annually.
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