Interview of R Ramanan, CEO, Atal Innovation Mission at the launch of AIC – Great Lakes Balachandran Incubator has been published by The Hindu Business Line.
Atal Innovation Mission Director R Ramanan highlights support provided by Atal Incubation Centres
Innovation is the 21st century buzzword, and the Centre’s flagship initiative to promote entrepreneurship is the Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), which comes under the NITI Aayog. R Ramanan, Mission Director, AIM, was at Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai, recently to inaugurate the Atal Incubation Centre (AIC) on its campus. He spoke to BusinessLine on how the AICs are enabling people with great ideas to launch their start-ups in an incubator. The objective of these innovation centres is ‘to nurture innovative start-ups in their pursuit to become scalable and sustainable business enterprises, he said. Excerpts:
How was Great Lakes Institute, or for that matter any other institute, chosen for the incubator?
We had solicited applications from across the country from people interested in setting up an incubator, and Great Lakes Institute was one of those that applied. We received several applications from government and private universities and research institutes. We went through a strong filtering process. Institutes were asked how they would run the incubators, what partnerships they would bring to the table and, based on all these criteria, a few were selected. It was a merit-driven process. A grant of up to ₹10 crore is given over five years. There are 50 operational incubators.
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