Ventures turn into businesses at this centre

There is plenty happening at the Nadathur S Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL), located at the sylvan Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore campus. For 15 years now, the NSRCEL has been the hub of entrepreneurial activity at IIMB, offering entrepreneurs getting incubated at the centre access to high quality mentors, faculty of IIMB and, above all, a serene and green environment to develop their ideas into business ventures.

Apart from being an open incubator – taking on board ventures that have no association with IIMB for incubation – the NSRCEL has a few other targeted programmes going. One of them is a programme for social enterprises, funded by the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. It recently started a programme for women entrepreneurs, funded by Goldman Sachs, where the entrepreneurs were selected for incubation for one year after an elaborate process that included a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in which more than 1,700 women participated. About 400 of them submitted business plans, 50 were selected to undergo a six-week residential programme at the centre and 12 selected for incubation.

Besides these, the centre will initiate the process of a scale-up incubator, because, says Rajiv Sawhney, Chief Operating Officer, there is a huge gap in the lives of entrepreneurs, where their ventures have stagnated and there is need for re-booting. “In that context, we will be starting work now to have a different approach. The start-up approach will not work here,” says Rajiv.

The NSRCEL was one of the incubators selected by the NITI Aayog for a scale-up support. It will get ₹10 crore over two years to expand its infrastructure.

According to Rajiv, the centre can accommodate 125 start-ups for incubation. It has about 40 entrepreneurs in the launchpad phase, which is the pre-incubation stage and it takes in 15-20 ventures for incubation every year. The entrepreneurs can be at the incubator for a year and in some cases, the period is extended by up to six months. The entrepreneurs give a 5 per cent stake in their ventures to NSRCEL, which gets funding from different Central government departments that it uses to do seed stage investing in ventures.

On the timing of the exits, Rajiv says it all depends on the entrepreneurs. The centre does not look at the stake from a commercial angle. It sells its stake whenever the entrepreneur requests for dilution.

According to him, the NSRCEL is sector agnostic and incubates ventures in diverse fields. The ventures being incubated at the centre include Black Bazaa Coffee, BinBag, Zoojoo.be, Turtle Yogi and Ttatva.

“We are sector agnostic. We are open. For us, it is the idea, the commitment and the passion of the entrepreneur that are important,” says Rajiv.

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