PERSONA
Distributed incubation may help promote grassroots innovations
NEWSCOPE
RESEARCH
ISSUES
WELL-BEING
TRENDS
THEME
By Dinesh C Sharma
S
everal grassroots innovations which we often hear about fail to make it to the market. This is due to a number of factors including lack of access to formal incubation facilities, venture capital, and prototyping and mentoring. In order to overcome these hurdles, experts have suggested setting up of special purpose incubators that can provide necessary technical and mentoring support to innovators in the non-formal sector. “The idea is to develop some kind of distributed incubation and to nurture ventures in their respective regions, in the spirit of in-situ incubation,” said Dr. Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, Department
of Science and Technology (DST) while presenting recommendations emerging from roundtables held as part of the Festival of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Rashtrapati Bhawan few months back. It was also suggested that since most innovative products fail to compete with large companies and against established products and brands, the government must develop norms for a preference in public procurement for such products.
Besides distributed incubation facilities, the roundtable also came up with the idea of ‘value addition centres’ which should be open for all innovators so that prototypes of innovations could
be further developed and converted into marketable products. At present, academic and research institutions are involved in developing prototypes only and innovators have to look elsewhere for fabrication. Commercial fabricators accept orders for large quantities. “Innovators need special fabrication centres where limited units of a finished product can be developed for a pilot study, market research and test commercialisation,” Dr. Sharma added. Innovators at FINE 2018 There is a need for testing and calibration of technologies developed by a large number of innovators. However, many innovators and startups do not have adequate funds for
