SSIP is trying to develop a grassroots level culture to harness creative potential of youth across academia in the state. Significant number of teams across domains and universities have demonstrated huge potential through their innovation and start-ups. Many of them are also participating in various national and international programmes to demonstrate their work or explore for further value addition. Various open innovation initiatives, boot camps, demo days, accelerators, incubators, hackathons, awards and competitions are happening at national and internal stages round the years. It has been noticed that many of our SSIP grantees and other student innovators and start-ups are actively taking part in such platforms. In the SSIP policy, a clear mandate is given to create holistic end to end ecosystem for student start-ups. Early exposure and validation for any innovator and start-ups in their journey plays critical role in widening their vison and put their skills towards right orientation. Hence it’s imperative that, we also work for supporting potential teams to participate in other ecosystems and bring back experience, achievement and insights which will laterally help others in our own ecosystem in Gujarat. Generally, such programmes have basic registration fees and the teams has to manage the travel and some logistic costs associated with it. It is recommended that SSIP cell at Education department can supports some of the outstanding teams for the same. A process like below can be put in place which will ensure that meritorious teams are supported for the cause.
State level expert committee and Evaluation
This committee will comprise experts from Incubators, Accelerators, Academia, Industry, Innovation Promotion Organizations and members from SSIP Cell. Teams of innovators, student start-ups who have been short listed to participate in such reputed national and internal initiatives have to apply through SSIP web portal. Periodically the applications can be reviewed by this expert committee and check the credibility/worthiness of SSIP support for the applicant. As some of the national and internal competitions are technical in nature, the experts from the start-up ecosystem present in the above committee can give suitable advice.