The Hindu Business Line : Ahmedabad — Grooming entrepreneurs!

THE city known for its business acumen could well become the capital for honing entrepreneurs and their commercial ventures. Ahmedabad today houses three major technology business incubators (TBIs) and two entrepreneur training centres, making it a haven for those who wish to start their own ventures.

The TBIs are run by the Indian Institute of Management (IIM-A), the National Institute of Design (NID) and the Nirma Group, while entrepreneur training is conducted at the Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India (EDI) and the Mudra Institute of Communications (MICA).

The youngest TBI in the fray is Nirma Group's incubation venture, NirmaLabs, whose architect Dr Madhu Mehta is on a whirlwind tour of the country's metros in search of potential global techno entrepreneurs (GTEs) who would like to venture into emerging markets such as information technology, biotechnology and life sciences.

With an intensive groom-incubate-grow programme, NirmaLabs intention has been to recreate the Silicon Valley ecosystem and take chosen entrepreneurs through three stages of their business ideas, eventually transforming them into fundable enterprises.

The first stage - grooming and teaming— entails six months of detailed deliberation into all aspects of global high technology entrepreneurship, including an exposure to high growth strategies, the global mindset, entrepreneurial finance, hi-tech marketing and others.

The second phase involves the incubation of the business ideas, wherein incubatees get the chance to develop their idea into a workable business model. Here an independent team evaluates the ideas's potential and lo and behold you could move onto the third stage where it could spin off into a start-up company if it attracts venture capital.

NirmaLabs functions at Nirma University under the aegis of the Nirma Education and Research Foundation (NERF) and has been allotted Rs 2.45 crore by the Government of India Department of Science and Technology (DST).

And if Nirma is betting on creating 150 GTEs and 25 viable companies, with five becoming "really big" in the next seven years, the IIM-A's Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), the oldest in the field, has some of its ongoing projects backed by Wadhwani Foundation (set up by IT entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, US) and DST.

The CIIE was set up as an outcome of a workshop on incubation 1998 and has brought together innovators, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, technology administrators and academics to help commercialise business ideas by individual innovators.

The third TBI is design oriented and incubates product design instead of only business ideas. A brainchild of NID, it aims to create design-led technology-driven new enterprises and foster `designpreneurship'.

The idea is to incubate design and provide financial and infrastructural assistance and technical and design know-how to incubatees for a period ranging from 18 to 36 months. It also aims to create design awareness among small-scale industry.

Entrepreneur training centres EDI and MICA — the former set up with the apex support of financial institutions such as IDBI, IFCI, ICICI and State Bank of India and the latter by Reliance Industries — both have similar aims, but in different fields.

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