The State government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Airbus BizLab India, a global aerospace accelerator which is part of Airbus, to set up an innovation centre in Thiruvananthapuram.
The innovation centre will be the nodal body for planning and executing all activities to help start-ups.
Anand E. Stanley, president and managing director, Airbus India and South Asia, and Saji Gopinath, CEO, Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM), signed the MOU in the presence of Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan at the Secretariat on Saturday.
Support for start-ups
Airbus BizLab will also provide support and mentoring for start-ups in Kerala and conduct regular workshops and discussions with experts from aerospace and defence sectors. Further, the France-headquartered company, which has set up facilities in Bengaluru, Toulouse (France), Hamburg (Germany) and Madrid (Spain) to create a global network of business accelerators, is to run training programmes to acquaint participants with aerospace technologies.
The company will identify opportunities to adapt aerospace technologies across sectors and bring all the relevant Airbus teams and start-ups to demonstrate technologies. After successful demonstration, it will help the innovation centre to sign partnerships and deploy the technologies. Chief Secretary Tom Jose; M. Sivasankar, Secretary, Kerala IT; Siddharth Balachandran, Leader, Airbus BizLab India; Margit Hellwig-Boette, German Consul General; M.C. Dathan, Scientific Advisor to the CM; Santhosh Kurup, CEO, ICT Academy; Hrishikesh Nair, CEO, Technopark; and Arun Balachandran, Chief Minister’s Fellow (IT) attended the event.
