The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), an industry association in India, has launched the CII Centre for Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Start-ups in Telangana over a digital platform, on Saturday. The centre is established with goal of helping startups to connect with large business houses and corporates.
The CII Centre for Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Start-ups is supported by the Government of Telangana, by way of space at T-Hub technology startup incubator in the city, and Pratiksha, a charitable trust founded by Mr. S Gopalakrishnan.
In his keynote address at the Launch ceremony, Mr Rao, applauded that the centre is a pioneering initiative of CII and is a standing testimony of an enabling ecosystem of Telangana. He further emphasized that the start-up-focused approach of the Telangana government can be estimated from its multiple sector-specific initiatives such as cleantech focused ‘Sanitation Hub (S-Hub)’, ‘We-Hub’ for supporting women entrepreneurs, prototyping centre - ‘T-Works’, block-chain accelerator ‘T-Block’, largest startup incubator, ‘T-Hub’, and the existence of progressive life sciences companies among others.
The Centre is set to provide a very robust platform for building a stronger entrepreneurial ecosystem in India. The primary objective of the Centre would be to attract most innovative start-ups to collaborate with the corporates and to help corporates identify suitable budding start-ups for forging business partnerships and work with start-ups at the co-working space.
The Centre shall forge partnerships with 9100 members of CII from the private as well as public sectors, including SMEs and MNCs, and an indirect membership of over 300,000 enterprises from 288 national and regional sectoral industry bodies. The Centre would curate a customised programme for corporate houses and enable connect with the right start-ups based on industry’s needs and future strategies.
Further, the CII Centre would lay a special focus on deep tech start-ups in manufacturing sector by creating a pool of potential start-ups from young researcher community and help them developing business plans and with investment.
The Centre would further help investors select potential start-ups for committing financial stake, build partnerships with the national and international academic centres of excellence (CoE) for imparting knowledge to and assistance in capacity development of budding start-ups, and work with Government of India and State governments to forge partnerships with foreign governments to launch mutual soft-landing of start-ups.
The Centre will serve as a knowledge Centre for preparing and empowering potential entrepreneurs in India through various capacity building programs and convert job seekers to job creators. The Centre will also strengthen capabilities of entrepreneurs to improve their competitiveness in the local and international markets, assist entrepreneurs in the process of business opportunity identification, analysis and finalization, supporting market research, facilitate technology tie-ups thereby creating enabling ecosystem for growth of start-up and employment generation