Kochi Startup Village to support 10,000 campus startups

The Kochi Startup Village will launch 10,000 campus startup teams across India in the next five years as part of its second phase, an official said on Tuesday.

For this, the village will align with the prime minister's Startup India programme.

"In Phase I, we succeeded in creating a seed entrepreneurial ecosystem in Kerala. In the next five years, we plan to support 10,000 campus startup teams across the country, completely digitise the incubation process and launch a new business model," said startup village chairman Sanjay Vijayakumar.

He said the village will now try to produce startups "straight from schools and colleges".

The Startup India programme is an ambitious project of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to strengthen entrepreneurship and will be launched on January 16.

The Kochi Startup Village is the country's first technology business incubator under the public-private partnership mode.

IIM Ahmedabad faculty Rakesh Basant, who conducted a study on the village for its next round of expansion, said: "The startup village has managed to build a momentum for an entrepreneurial culture in Kerala and has begun to create an entrepreneurial eco-system. The challenge is to sustain this momentum, scale-up and become financially self-sustaining."

Sanctioned in 2011 by the department of science and technology, the village was set up with the aim of incubating startups over a period of five years.

The startup village, recognised by the union government as the best technology business incubator in 2015, has tied up with five universities in and outside the state for integrating entrepreneurship with the curriculum.