The Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Education (APSCHE) has asked universities and professional and autonomous colleges to establish Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Start-Ups Centres (EISCs) to promote the culture of entrepreneurship in the State.
“The aim is to ignite creative thinking and nurture entrepreneurial talent in students,” said council Vice-Chairman K. Ramamohan Rao.
“By the end of this year, there will be more than 500 such centres in educational institutions,” he said.
“We want to encourage young graduates to become ‘job generators’ rather than ‘job seekers’, and create an innovation ecosystem,” said Mr. Rao.
The role of these centres will entail organising awareness campaign with focus on promotion of entrepreneurial attitude among youth.
Their other activities are to identify potential candidates and initiate programmes to groom them, give the candidates business ideas and convert them into viable business/incubation plans and create new technology ventures, facilitate preparation of feasibility report and Detailed Project Reports (DPR) as per the requirement of the funding agencies, mentoring, networking, providing connectivity with resources and facilitating early stage seed funding.
To motivate the students, the centres will conduct workshops, competitions and interactive sessions with eminent personalities and organise other annual events.
The EISC will be guided by an advisory committee consisting of representatives from faculty, industry, business houses, District Industry Centres, banks, successful local entrepreneurs and local government. The committee will work under the chairmanship of the Vice-Chancellor in a university and the principal in a college. Each centre will have a director as an overall in-charge, who can be one of the senior professors from the institution or an experienced person from outside the institution, appointed on contract basis.
These centres will identify resource persons from different sectors such as manufacturing, service and social sector, or specific business domain and constitute suitable panels, each of which will be represented by persons from the Department of Industries, banking, teaching (preferably commerce and management) and an expert from related business domain.
State-level committee
A State-level advisory and monitoring committee will be constituted with the Chairman, APSCHE, at its helm, and the members will be from State universities, colleges, Ministry of Industry, Ministry of MSME and Andhra Pradesh State Skill Development Corporation (APSSDC).
“The committee will periodically review the activities and progress of the centres, which will be required to submit an annual report in a prescribed format duly approved by the Executive Council of the respective university in March every year,” explained Mr. Rao.
The panel may visit some centres physically or interact with the beneficiaries in the online mode and will submit a consolidated annual report to the APSCHE and to the government.
“Exploring the possibilities of connecting the industry, business, State and Central government’s support programmes and research organisations with these centres, the committee will promote an entrepreneurial ecosystem in the State,” said Mr. Rao.
