The plan to make Visakhapatnam a startup hub failing by facilitating physical incubation at Sunrise Startup Village here, the State government has decided to reorient its strategy by focusing on digital incubation and bootcamps at campus level.
“Keeping the changing scenario, we are reorienting our strategy. There is no change in our aim to usher in a new startup era to encourage out-of-the box ideas among young minds,” Innovation Society CEO Nikhil Agarwal told The Hindu .
Innovation Society, an autonomous body formed as per new IT, innovation and startup policies, will take physical possession of startup village. NASSCOM warehouse is being allotted space in the startup village to offer limited time incubation to startups. The government has set a target to have 5,000 startups by 2020 across the State.
Levelling work on four acres to build Millennium Tower is in progress by APIIC near Startup Village at Rushikonda. The tower will provide readymade infrastructure for plug in and plug out operators.
The first boot camp after the new strategy adopted by the government will be conducted at Andhra University by inviting a technology expert from MIT.
MobMe Wireless Solutions, with which the government signed an MoU to develop startups by incubating them on the lines of Silicon Valley, says it is changing its role from managing the physical infrastructure to going deeper into the school and college education system to build a culture of entrepreneurship.
“After a year of operations, we realised that the technical and entrepreneurial depth of teams is weak and needs to be strengthened from the college side to create strong founders,” co-founder of MobMe and Kochi Startup Village Chairman Sanjay Vijayakumar said.
He said now they wanted to follow Kerala and Gujarat model by conducting training programmes for students in collaboration with JNTU-Kakinada and JNTU-Anantapur.
State will encourage out-of-the-box ideas among young minds, says CEO of Innovation Society
