UK innovation express tour

One week, four Indian cities and over 300 Indian attendees gives SIN an opportunity to promote the UK’s excellence in innovation and incubation and celebrate ‘Technology is GREAT’ across India.

The SIN India team and UK innovation experts showcased the strengths of our innovation and incubation ecosystem in India. Experts from Cambridge Enterprise, IdeaSpace, Isis Innovation, Imperial College London, Nesta, AcceleratorIndia and Ledmac were part of a week-long mission to Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bangalore and Trivandrum. Whilst promoting UK strengths it was important to understand the research and innovation landscape in India and exploring collaborative opportunities. With our tour coinciding with GREAT Tech Week we joined up with prosperity colleagues in UKTI and Knowledge Economy Advisor networks to deliver events across these four great cities.

In Hyderabad, the delegation met with officials of Andhra Pradesh (AP) Government. Our UK experts held discussions with the Special Secretary Information Technology, Secretary Higher Education and Secretary Skills and Innovation along with Vice Chancellors of universities in AP. The meeting focussed on the state government’s policies on innovation and how it could use UK’s knowledge and incubation models to accelerate technology transfer.

In 2014, Andhra Pradesh formally split into two with the creation of Telangana – so our experts met with the Telangana government (GoT) to discuss their approach to incubation. The recent launch of the incubator T-Hub reflects the drive to support new starts up. It is a public private partnership (PPP) between the GoT, IIIT-H, ISB, NALSAR and key private sector leaders and brings entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and mentors onto a single platform. Our delegation was suitably impressed with the infrastructure, facilities and the environment created to support new start-ups. We had the pleasure of meeting with two key players in T-Hub – the GoT Secretary IT and Chief Operating Officer of T-Hub. This led to discussions on creating a T-Hub office in UK and tapping into its innovation community to act as mentors in addition to T-Hub transitioning UK entrepreneurs to seek opportunities in India.

The tour moved onto Mumbai – where our experts joined a wider event looking at Innovation and Technology commercialisation. With a broad range of attendees from industry, academia and Government including officials from BIRAC, DBT, Maharashtra’s State Innovation Council, Venture Center, CSIR Tech, Godrej & Boyce, Reliance GenNext, Indian Institute of Technology and Institute of Chemical Technology, we examined in detail the strengths and opportunities in our innovation ecosystems and the mutual benefit of deeper collaboration.

Next stop was Bangalore. The Karnataka State Minister for Large and Medium Industries and Tourism, Mr. RV Deshpande, inaugurated our workshop pinpointing India’s growing start-up ecosystem. One of the drivers to starting up a new business is the ease with which you can do business. Working together with the Karnataka government the British Deputy High Commissioner Ian Felton released the ‘Ease of Doing Business in Karnataka’ report. (A quick side note that sadly Ian has moved on to his next diplomatic posting for which we wish him the best of luck!).

This time we didn’t fly off to our next destination and stayed on to visit some of the key Bangalore-based institutions supporting innovation and incubation. A visit to the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) was an opportunity to meet with the Karnataka State Council for Science and technology (KSCST) and Society for Innovation and Development (SID) – discussions focussed on nurturing technological innovations, student and faculty entrepreneurship, translation of technologies and the way forward for UK-India collaboration. Next up was a short drive to the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) where we met Dr. Taslimarif Saiyed and his team, whose organisation provides laboratories and facilities for researchers cum entrepreneurs supporting their translation journey.  We’ve seen UK-India collaboration in action. Earlier this year C-CAMP signed a strategic partnership agreement with Cambridge based One Nucleus to promote stronger ties with the Cambridge/London cluster.

A long week came culminated in a trip to Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala.  We drew senior hosts in the Kerala state government with our workshop inaugurated by Mr. Jiji Thomson, Chief Secretary, Government of Kerala and Mr. L Radhakrishnan, Chairman, Kerala State Innovation Council. You may recall my colleague Murtaza visited here earlier this year to meet with key players promoting the UK’s expertise. So bringing our experts to Kerala boosted our efforts promoting UK collaborations in commercialisation of research, how to be a successful incubator, and looking at joint funding opportunities in life sciences, clean energy and food processing.

There is no doubt this week long event had the desired impact in deepening our partnership with state governments, institutions and industry alongside the work we’re doing at a national level between the UK and India. The events also received wide media coverage in Bengaluru and Thiruvananthapuram. We’re confident that sharing UK and India’s experiences in incubating start-ups and commercialising of technologies could open up new opportunities for better policy making and academia-industry collaborations.  The upcoming visit to India to meet with State Government officials to discuss joint programmes is planned in early 2016. We will keep you updated through our blogs. Please contact my colleague Murtaza for further details!