CIIE at IIM Ahmedabad partnered with The Royal Academy of Engineering, London to support the finalists of Power of Ideas to give them global exposure.
The Royal Academy of Engineering hosts Leaders in Innovation Fellow(LIF) program to foster long-term partnerships between India and the UK by promoting innovation and entrepreneurial skill development. LIFs are selected from across the globe, including Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, Vietnam and India. The LIF programme hand picks innovators from selected partner countries for an intensive residential course in entrepreneurship and research commercialisation. The participants gets access to the Academy’s network of investors, entrepreneurs and past fellows at the Enterprise Hub.
The innovators are jointly selected by the Academy and an in-country partner organisation on the basis of their research, potential of their innovation, social and economic benefits of their innovation, and their potential as an entrepreneur. The Academy’s official partner in India is CIIE. Indian cohort of program consists of 17 teams which were selected from the Power of Ideas finalists by RAE. RAE has selected early-stage scientific/hard-tech innovations that have high impact potential in India. Each participant travelled to UK for a 8-day residential programme with the primary objective of capacity building (through training and mentoring) with additional emphasis on commercialisation of their research. A wider benefit of the programme was the creation of international networks of innovators and technology entrepreneurs.
The eight-day programme from February 9-18, 2015 was divided into two segments. The first, is a five-day training programme hosted by the Academy. It covered a variety of commercialisation skills; including business modelling, customer development, and presentation/pitch training. The second part was a 3-day group project which was hosted by Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at the University of Cambridge. There was Group Project Activity that will allow fellows to apply the skills and knowledge developed during the previous week’s training programme to problem-solving exercises.
Selected Companies (along with sector of operation) for this Programme are as follows:
- Avani Bio energy Renewable Energy
- Bana Consulting Private Limited Waste Management
- Decimal Technologies Information Technology
- Ecozen Solutions Agriculture and Cleantech
- Enfin Technologies E-Learning
- Excel Matrix Therapeutic Medical Devices
- Gray Routes Logistics, IT
- Idea Choice Homes Housing
- LinkSmart Security & Packaging
- Know Your Genome Labs Healthcare and Diagnostics
- Media Ants Media and Entertainment
- mLabs Research Electronics,Hardware
- NIQOTIN Information Technology
- Novo Informatics Life Science & Pharmaceuticals
- Pocket Friendly water purifier Water & Sanitation
- Smart Cloud Technologies CRM (Healthcare)
- Valu Connex Telecom Services Telecom domain
About Royal Academy of Engineering
As the UK’s National Academy for Engineering and a registered charity, the Royal Academy of Engineering (The Academy) brings together the most successful and talented engineers from across sectors to advance and promote excellence in engineering. The Academy is a formal partner of the UK Government’s Newton Fund,which is part of the UK’s official overseas development assistance (ODA), which aims to develop international science and innovation partnerships that promote the economic development and welfare of partner countries.
About Power of Ideas
Power of Ideas (2010 & 2012) is the largest entrepreneurship competition in India in partnership with Department of Science and Technology and Economic Times.
Testimonial from participants:
Mukesh Agarwal, Media Ant
…camping together with these varied start ups helped each other in sharing ideas, thoughts and problems. In fact in lot of cases, start ups were able to solve each others problems. Being a fellow we all can reach out to other fellows without any hesitation for any help, this gives a huge support and confidence to Entrepreneurs. During the program in Cambridge we were allotted mentors with strong background such as entrepreneurs, corporate and professors. These mentors are immensely helpful in discussing ideas, connecting with experts, investors etc. It is very difficult to get mentors otherwise, specially in the case of bootstrapping…
Ramaa Sundar Raj, SmartRx
…coaches from ISIS Innovation (University of oxford) who listened to our pitch and gave a feedback on how we can improve better. We had a guest lecture from John Ross of Blatchford Group. It was good to know what they do and I got a chance to personally talk to him and see how we can enter UK market. Our team coach was Jamie Urquhart, Co-founder of Arm Ltd. Pleasure to get mentored from him. In between we had some time to look around Cambridge and visited Trinity college, saw Newton’s apple tree and other places. We were invited for master class in London from Anne Glover, (Venture Capitalist) Amadeus Capital Partners. I was able to attend it and nice to hear her entrepreneurial journey and got few pointers from her. It was overall a great experience and big kudos to all the people who made it happen starting from CIIE Initiatives, to Royal Academy of London folks and Cambridge university people. We would love to have many more sessions like this and have global
CIIE @ IIM Ahmedabad 