Facilities Provided by STEP/TBI IIT KGP

• Mentoring: In house mentoring by the host institution and external mentoring (if required) are provided to the entrepreneurs for better functioning of their firms.
• Financial Support: Initial seed support in the form of grant and loan is provided to the entrepreneurs.
• R & D Support: Infrastructural and other supports for facilitating the R&D activities of the firms are provided by STEP, IIT Kharagpur.
• Networking and Market Exploring: STEP, IIT Kharagpur provides market information facilitating a platform for network creation by the entrepreneurs.
• Knowledge Diffusion: Facilitates transformation of knowledge through technological advancements for value creation.

Other Projects

• “Promoting Innovations in Individuals Start-Ups and MSME” (PRISM): Is the erstwhile “Technopreneur Promotion Programme” (TePP). TePP is an initiative of Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India to transform an individual innovator into a successful Technopreneur by promoting, supporting, funding untapped creativity of individual innovators. “TePP” was launched by the Ministry of Science and Technology in 1998-99 and was jointly operated by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) and Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC) of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) but at present it is operated by DSIR alone since May 2008. PRISM is for budding students, professionals and common citizens interested in innovation and having an implementable and commercially viable, novel innovation. An innovator of Indian nationality, interested in innovation is provided Grant –in-aid support by PRISM DSIR for prototype development and commercialization subject to completion of sanction of project which includes evaluations, technical and financial viability as well as commercially viable analysis. PRISM -DSIR also helps the innovators to get acquainted with the fundamentals of patenting as well as technical and strategic assistance in idea development. In 2014 IIT-Kharagpur has been selected as TePP Outreach cum Cluster Innovation Centre for PRISM.
• Technology Incubation and Development of Entrepreneurs (TIDE): Center at IIT, Kharagpur has clear policy and a transparent process for selection of companies for incubation. The selection is being done on the basis of a detailed techno-commercial proposal which includes a viable business plan which is submitted by entrepreneur(s) At next level the proposal is subjected to evaluation on the basis of its technical merit and commercial viability by a committee of technical experts who recommend the level and duration as well as terms of support to the prospective entrepreneur(s).
• Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs): Have been accepted as the engine of economic growth and for promoting equitable development. The major advantage of the sector is its employment potential at low capital cost. The labour intensity of the MSME sector is much higher than that of the large enterprises. The MSMEs constitute over 90% of total enterprises in most of the economies and are credited with generating the highest rates of employment growth and account for a major share of industrial production and exports. In India too, the MSMEs play a pivotal role in the overall industrial economy of the country. In recent years the MSME sector has consistently registered higher growth rate compared to the overall industrial sector. With its agility and dynamism, the sector has shown admirable innovativeness and adaptability to survive the recent economic downturn and recession.
• Technology Development Board (TDB): Is another arm of the DST mandated with providing capital support to the incubated companies. The funding support is made available to the start-ups of the business accelerators to promote the speedy scale-up of companies in the business incubator. Funding support is available at lower rates charged by banking and other financial institutions.

ACADEMICS TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP

IIT Kharagpur has scored unexpected endeavours by setting up Technology Business incubator (TBI) for promotion of entrepreneurship and innovation and also kept its commitment by initiating the first school of engineering entrepreneurship (Rajendra Mishra School of Engineering Entrepreneurship (RMSOEE).

RMSoEE founded at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur in the year 2010 aims to encourage entrepreneurial minds of the engineering students. It is a first school of its kind in India. The School imparts strong entrepreneurial culture and ecosystem for venture creation and early start-ups. The school offers 5-year integrated dual degree program with M. Tech in Engineering Entrepreneurship and B. Tech in an Engineering discipline. The B. Tech or Dual Degree M. Tech students of engineering departments opt for this program from their second year of study. They continue their B. Tech in their parent department while taking courses in entrepreneurship. Finally they earn their entrepreneurship specialization in their fifth year. RMSoEE was created to establish a model dual degree M. Tech in engineering entrepreneurship programme. Hence the faculty have diverse background and experiences as appropriate for this unique school. The courses are designed with a blend of both technology and management aspects. Here, the faculty and students are nurtured with a culture of innovation, inquiry, problem-solving, entrepreneurship, and research, to assure that the students stay current with the latest developments in their respective fields, and they are encouraged to explore various interdisciplinary areas.

Infrastructure

• Innovation Lab: I-lab is where innovations born. Innovation Lab at RMSoEE, aims to produce entrepreneurially oriented competent individuals. Each student of RMSoEE is attached with innovation laboratory from 2nd year onwards of their IIT learning journey. The lab provides a viable ecosystem for research on various aspects of innovation and entrepreneurship which includes Business Intelligence, Business Architecture, and Technology Interventions for venture creation, Product Development Strategies and Quality of Services. Through innovation based practices, the lab acts as a platform for knowledge creation, maintenance and dissemination to stakeholders.
• Business Analytics Lab: The analytics lab at RMSoEE is envisioned to provide hands-on training to the students and innovators on application of various analytical tools and techniques for business intelligence and business decision making. The lab would house necessary hardware platform and software tools for supporting research and training needs in the following areas: Statistical analysis, Forecasting and predictive analytics, Market analytics, Financial analytics, Operational analytics, Data mining and visualization, Big data analytics.
• Techno-Entrepreneurial Leadership Lab: MSME sector contributes towards a major part of the country’s economy but its development lags behind due to lack of techno entrepreneurial behavior of these industry leaders to accommodate the uncertainty in market completion, fund availability, capacity utilization, becoming the product champions and negotiating with internal and external environment. This lab tends to develop the different measures of techno-entrepreneurial leadership quality through uncertainty management, guiding radical innovations, integrating value network, managing innovation life cycle, etc. and also provide some of the other computational facilities for carrying out quantitative and qualitative research on the same.
• Healthcare Analytics Lab: Big Data has tremendous potential for transforming the healthcare industry. The healthcare analytics lab at RMSoEE would attempt to identify managerial issues in healthcare service delivery. The lab would also develop innovative analytical models and evaluate their effectiveness in Indian scenario. Some of the activities being planned under this lab are: Analytics for Medical Diagnosis –e.g. detection of cancerous cells etc., healthcare knowledge management, Personalized Medicine, Decision making in emergency care, Predictive Analytics and Preventive Measures, Patient classification, Patient Monitoring, Patient Privacy Preserving techniques.
• Modeling Lab: The modern business environment is affected by a number of factors making business models highly complex and dynamic. The analysis of business models requires a huge number of scenarios to be generated and iterative performance evaluation. The complexity is further aggravated with the volume, velocity, and the variety of data generated in the business process. Big data analytics becomes indispensable for effective business decisions in this complex and dynamic business environment. We need to simulate and analyze the dynamics of network among various agents, business environments, and evaluation of business models. The modeling lab would facilitate evaluation of innovative and entrepreneurial ideas. The lab would be equipped with tools for Statistical modeling, Game theoretic modeling, System dynamics, Network modeling and analysis, and Business model analysis etc. (See Figure 3).

Figure 3. Start-ups supported by STEP/TBI IIT Kharagpur

The typical case as described above, at IIT Kharagpur STEP/TBI center incubated more than 85 companies of different domain, a list of which is attached in Annexure I. The distribution of initiative shows only 12% is created by the faculties, 19% is promoted by the students, and rest are the outside entrepreneurs. The other observation from the list we observed that, 27% within the lot of outside entrepreneurs are alumni of the institute, and this may the silver lining. This may indicate that the students, who went outside with jobs and interacted with the industry, got more idea about the entrepreneurial opportunity. The distribution surely puts a question mark on the academic entrepreneurship success in a premier technology school in India. The outside entrepreneur companies do get technology and management support in terms of mentoring from the institute. The institute has created a new Entrepreneurship School (Rajendra Mishra School of Engineering Entrepreneurship) to facilitate the center and make academic contribution through training and research in the domain.

Challenges

1. 1. Lack of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Orientation: There is a lack of orientation provided to students during education at schools and college .This hinders the growth of an innovative and entrepreneurship mindset during the childhood phase making them unprepared to take up future challenges and risks to start up or initiate creativity.

2. 2. Lack of Proper Handholding for Entrepreneurs: There is a lack of proper handholding for prospective innovators and entrepreneurs who wish to venture into creative knowledge production. There is a lack of innovation and entrepreneurship support mechanisms across all prominent higher education institutions.

3. 3. Lack of Support Program for Commercialization of Products: The innovativeness is hindered due to lack of proper commercialization support mechanism, and patent support mechanism. In the absence of proper financial support incentive to promote innovation, several ideas do not get the opportunity to be commercially available in the market and die during conceptualization, or initial product prototype development phase.

4. 4. Lack of Industry Linkages: The absence of proper innovation support provided to employees in private sector and industrial houses to pursue individual project is seldom available. On the other hand individual employees are restricted to pursue their own innovation as the industries fear that they might compromise on the Intellectual property of the organization. Lack of industry support available for innovators and students involved in innovations to carry out innovation at industries is another major reason for lack of innovative and entrepreneurship practices.

5. 5. Lack of Government University Interaction: Lack of government to academic institution communication leading to failure of support programs run at HEI based cluster parks. This has been a major problem in incubation support systems and programs running on government support. Lack of communication is hampering the proper functioning of the innovation system at HEI run cluster parks.

6. 6. Lack of Definition of Success: It is very difficult to define just what “success” represents relative to business incubators represents. There are a number of reasons for this. The first is that business incubators are started for many different reasons; some, to increase the economy, others to increase the job market, while others are simply the extension centers in a University setup. Some business incubators are not started with a clear mission in mind. Because of different starting points, or no starting point at all, different affiliation, it is difficult to view how well a business incubator is doing (See Figure 4).