S A N J AY V I J AYA KU M A R

Chairman Startup Village

ndian universities aren’t particularly known to be hotbeds of innovation and entrepreneurship—at least not yet. The emphasis on academic rotelearning in schools carries over to colleges, where students are groomed primarily for the service industry. A steady job with a reputed firm and a fat pay cheque still forms the upper layer of aspiration for many. The most successful technology entrepreneurs in India today may have come up with their ideas while inside the campus, but have had to build their companies from scratch in the outside world. Indian campuses have seldom provided the conducive, entrepreneurship-oriented ecosystem that gave rise to companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook. The good news, however, is that there are definite signs that it’s all going to change in the coming years. The Make in India initiative is not just a policy roadmap for the future; it is also a reflection of the fact that young India is very different from its risk-averse predecessors. Innovation is not something that happens to other people. College-goers no longer want to be job seekers, but job creators. My own entrepreneurial journey with MobME and Startup Village is what makes me confident that ‘Make in Universities’ can be a keystone for the Make in India initiative. My friends and I founded MobME as third-year students at the College of Engineering, Trivandrum. It was the first campus startup incubated at Technopark. When we were funded by US-based Sequoia Capital, it was the first technology investment in a Kerala startup by a venture capital firm. As representatives of MobME we had the opportunity to meet the late President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam. Like the true visionary he had always been, he asked us to build an entrepreneurship knowledge platform for the Indian youth, to help them access information on how to create startups and become technopreneurs. That was essentially the inspiration for Startup Village (SV). When it was set up in 2012 as India’s first PPP-model technology business incubator, SV’s modest target was to incubate some 50 companies in five years. Three years on, it has received over 6,000 applications and incubated more than 70 physical and 500 virtual startups that have, collectively, created nearly 3,000 jobs and are valued at a whopping 292 crore. Our key learning from SV is that students in colleges are overwhelmingly interested in entrepreneurship, they just need the right kind of guidance. SV.CO is our industry-academia partnership model that offers recognition to entrepreneurial learning as part of engineering degrees in India. MobME is now building SV.CO as a digital learning platform for first-time founders, backed by universities such as Gujarat Technological University (GTU), with more looking to come on board. The entrepreneurship wave is definitely sweeping into our campuses. And young India has plenty of successful Indian startups to take inspiration from. At Startup Village, among our most successful companies is Fin Robotics, which raised more than US$200,000 in global crowdfunding and went on to raise over US$2 million in Series A funding to develop the Neyya smart ring. The idea of this wearable gadget germinated in the minds of a bunch of young, small-town robotics geeks, travelled through the entrepreneurial assembly line and emerged as a chic smart ring launched by Donna Karan’s brand Urban Zen in the fashion capital of New York. That is the scale at which college students dream today and that is why we must ‘Make in Universities’ when we Make in India. The next billion-dollar company will emerge from an Indian campus; it’s just a matter of time.

ILLUSTRATION: IAN JOHNSON

“THE MAKE IN INDIA INITIATIVE IS A REFLECTION OF THE FACT THAT YOUNG INDIA IS VERY DIFFERENT FROM ITS RISK-AVERSE PREDECESSORS”