With a mission to create the next wave of IT product entrepreneurs in India, top honchos of IT and telecom companies have pledged institutional and technological support to foster next generation telecom and Internet start-ups at the Kochi based Startup Village.

The pledge for support to budding entrepreneurs was made at a high-profile brainstorming meet at the Infosys campus in Bengaluru.

The meet, held at the initiative of Infosys co-chairman and Startup Village Chief mentor Kris Gopalakrishnan on last Friday, was attended by top functionaries of the Indian units of around 30 companies, including Intel, Alcatel-Lucent, KPMG, Capgemini, Blackberry, Nokia Siemens Networks, IBM and Gemalto.

H K Mittal, Head and Advisor, National Science and Technology Entrepreneur Development Board (NSTEDB), said that that Startup Village, India's first Public-Private Partnership Incubator, is a keystone in creating the blueprint for the next 1000 incubators for the country.

“The Government of India has been promoting incubation for the last 28 years and this is for the first time that so many leaders have come together in the same room (the NandanNilekani's conference room),” he said.

The Startup Village aims to promote 1,000 telecom-internet product startups in the 18-25 age groups in ten years. Based at Kinfra High Tech Park, it is the first business incubator in the country on the private-public-partnership basis. Nasscom, CII, TIE and COAI are leading industry associations backing this ambitious initiative.

Gopalakrishnan said the significant effort of creating 1000 startups requires visionary leaders from across industries to come together and contribute meaningfully. “It’s time to think beyond the obvious and take a giant leap forward for building the ecosystem need for next generation of IT product startups from India," added the co-chairman of Infosys on the vision about India's largest and most ambitious incubation project to date. 

The meeting assumes great significance as India is trying to scale up the incubation ecosystem for generating growth and employment. Currently, there are around 5,000 incubators in the world, of which 2,000 are in the US and 1,000 in China. India has been able to produce only 65 incubators during the last 28 years and is now looking to leapfrog to at least 1,000 in the country.

Startup Village, being in Public Private Partnership (PPP) model, is seen as one of the key pilots by the Central Government to scale up innovation and entrepreneurship in the country, especially in engineering colleges. “The Planning Commission is making some significant moves and will shortly announce path-breaking initiatives for scaling incubation ecosystem in India,” said Dr Mittal.