Five teams comprising budding innovators from schools and colleges in Kerala are set to receive State support to scale up their projects under a scheme designed to promote new ventures in the start-up ecosystem.
The innovators became eligible for the Innovators Privilege Card after successfully developing and showcasing prototypes of five products as part of the Young Innovators Programme (YIP), jointly organised by the Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM) and the Kerala Development and Innovation Strategic Council (K-DISC).
The five prototypes have been developed by young innovators from three institutions — Sanatana Dharma College, Alappuzha; St. George English Medium LP School, Chully, Angamaly; and SNHSS Pullamkulam, North Paravur. The showcased products are fingerprint bike starter, automatic water-level indicator, utilisation of water hyacinth, solar water heater and drier, and energy-saving cooking vessels.
The achievement will help them get priority in accessing KSUM’s schemes, grants, investment, mentoring, Fablab facility, cross sell platforms and incubation. Besides, the Privilege Card offers them free access to KSUM-organised summits and events like Big Demo Day.
Commenting on the YIP project, KSUM Chief Executive Officer Anoop Ambika termed the innovative ideas from the younger minds highly commendable and promised support to take them to the next level. “It’s significant that such ideas are cropping up from educational institutions in the State. Nurturing the budding talents will boost efforts to ramp up the start-up ecosystem,” he added.
The YIP provided funding support to a total of 15 selected projects in 2019.
Conceived by the K-DISC, the YIP aims at empowering future innovators to come out with new products, services or models to meet emerging requirements, unarticulated needs, or existing market needs more effectively through an innovation challenge.
