Right after we learnt that the International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IITH) was launching a programme for those women-led start-ups who are positively impacting the lives of their own gender, the first question we asked was: Is it an either-or situation? Does it mean the start-up needs to be both by and for women or one of the two? Anubhav Tiwari, Head - Incubation, Community and Corporate Innovation says, "It could be either, but don't keep wondering about it and not apply at all! Reach out to us and ask us your queries and we will help you out."
And he encompassed the whole of IIITH's spirit of not only encouraging innovation but being open to it too in that one answer. And this time, their Social Impact Tech-Incubator for Women Entrepreneurs at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) IIITH, in partnership with Pernod Ricard India Foundation, is inviting those women entrepreneurs making a social impact to apply for this incubation programme called We.
Down to the details
With 200 start-ups working at IIITH at any given point, they are more than happy to make room for more, for eight more start-ups, to be specific. And for eight months, the start-ups chosen for We will be mentored every step of the way by in-house experts, who specialise in the deep tech. "Not just this, we will also guide them through entering the market, communicating about their product, infrastructure, give them office space and many other amenities," says Anubhav adding that, "Continuous reviews will ensure that the start-ups are achieving the milestones they set out to achieve". During the duration, the start-ups will get Rs 25 lakh as funding, which could go up to more, we hear. The only ask before all this is that the start-ups are in their early stages and have a basic Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in place combined with customer validation.
"We want to help the product the start-ups have developed create more impact and help them from prototyping to the actual stage," asserts Anubhav. The registrations for We close on March 1, the selected start-ups will be announced on April 17 and the incubation begins April 23 and ends on December 23.
Take notes
Anubhav reasons that there is a lot of scope for start-ups in the education and financial literacy sectors and he strongly feels that most of the scope lies in the rural areas. So any word of advice for entrepreneurs in general, we ask? "Sometimes, they tend to focus on their product and service so much that they don't see the market. They might have the best product, but there needs to be a market for it and one should never forget that," he says in conclusion.
For more information, check out cie.iiit.ac.in/pernod-ricard
