iCreate's Ahd campus to be ready in a year's time

The International Centre for Entrepreneurship & Technology (iCreate) led by Infosys chairman emeritus N R Narayana Murthy on Sunday held its first advisory board meeting here in the city.

The 35 acre iCreate campus in the outskirts of Ahmedabad is likely to be operational in a year’s time.

Meanwhile, the centre will start some programmes by the year-end, informed Madhukumar Mehta, chief mentor of iCreate adding that the campus would take around a year to build. The first batch size would be around 30 people.

Currently, iCreate is functioning from its 2500 square feet city office at the Gujarat Mineral Development Corporation (GMDC) building Ahmedabad under the aegis of Gujarat Foundation of Entrepreneurial Excellence, a joint venture company in public private partnership.

iCreate was launched in September 2011 with a view to create an ecosystem that would nurture and enable young aspiring entrepreneurs. It is an autonomous centre of excellence which plans to work with students, aspiring and existing entrepreneurs, high growth companies in its upcoming incubation centre.

Murthy elaborated that iCreate would function primarily on two anchor ideas, globalisation and technology. “We will by and large focus as much as possible on ideas that would leverage the power of globalisation and the power of technology. We want our entrepreneurs to focus on inclusive technology”, he said.

iCreate has signed a MoU with with Israel’s science and technology institute Technion for cooperation in areas of entrepreneurship, innovation and technology earlier this month. Technion is a global leader in applied research, technology transfer and commercialisation.

Upbeat on the collaboration, Murthy said that entrepreneurs at iCreate would have a lot to learn from Technion. “Israel has the largest number of companies listed on the Nasdaq after the US”, he mentioned.