“Connect between opportunities, ecosystem, investors, and market with a composite expertise important for start-ups” says Prof K Vijayraghavan at the CII Startupreneur Awards Ceremony

Today, start-ups need to knock the doors of multiple entities like incubators, investors, mentors and market-access facilitators in order to establish, run, and grow the business and more often they perish before they flourish. Such condition for our start-ups have been prevalent for some time now due to the absence of an empowering ecosystem, which also includes a large chasm between our established corporate houses and the budding start-ups.

Indeed, the slew of measures taken by the Government will be instrumental for the growth of the start-up ecosystem, but it will not be sufficient to scale it to the level we all envisage. To achieve this bigger goal, private sector must join this movement more intensely and play an important role by shouldering responsibilities with the Government.

Worldwide the Start-ups are consistently becoming more competitive and innovative, and they are simultaneously challenging the existing business rules and practices. In this constantly-changing technology-driven world the innovation and new knowledge created by start-ups are becoming indispensable for large organizations to retain business competitive. Although this shift in focus and priority for corporates in India to invest in start-ups as a strategy to counter the uncertain future, has been largely absent.

To trigger this Startup-Corporate connect movement and to make Indian companies think more proactively in this direction CII is advocating a collegium of Futuristic Business Houses where its members will pledge to support start-ups in similar business line or otherwise, and offer support on mentoring, arranging capital, buying back products/service etc. to these start-ups to grow. This will not only increase the chances of success of the start-ups multi-fold and generate more employment opportunity but will also create a robust culture of corporate-sponsored start-ups, leading to creation of new ideas and innovations at each other’s disposal.

CII Startupreneur Awards is the first step in this direction of connecting start-ups with the corporate. 10 corporate houses (Bharti Airtel, Cyient, Godrej & Boyce, Godrej Consumer Products, Infosys, JCB, Jubilant Life Sciences, L&T, PI Industries, Tata Steel) responded positively to be front-runner in this mutually gainful initiative.

In a spectacular awards ceremony hosted by Confederation of Indian Industry, the apex industry body, recognized Top corporates supported CII Startupreneur Award 2018 winners on 3 December in Delhi.

Felicitating the winners of Start-up awards, Mr Kris Gopalakrishnan, Past President, CII; Chairman, CII Start-up council; Co-Founder, Infosys Limited mentioned that in the last four years, we have embarked on the journey of innovation and entrepreneurship which is measurable through initiatives like Ease of Doing Business and Global Innovation Index. He further stated that in the coming 20 years, India aspires to progress from a 2.8 trillion dollars economy to 10 trillion dollars economy and innovation would play a key role to drive this growth. With Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi leading this from the front, our country has started gaining significant momentum in start-up and innovation culture. He also pointed out that private sector need to play an important role towards supporting innovation and entrepreneurship, and the launch of CII startupreneur awards is a positive step in this direction.

Prof K VijayRaghavan, Prinicipal Scientific Advisor to Government of India, distinguished Chief Guest of the Awards function while congratulating the awardees, addressed the challenges faced by start-ups, role of government in start-up and entrepreneurship ecosystem and the initiatives taken by government in this direction. He mentioned that startups face enormous challenges such as establishing appropriate connects with industry, academia and other stakeholders, scalability, availability of resources, and sustainability. He mentioned that for a start-up to succeed it may not always be necessary to have a new or a fantastic idea; connect between opportunities, ecosystem, investors and market along with composite experience is important. He also emphasized that although the global success rate of start-ups is rather low, failure is an important index/ metric for their success and an appropriate viability mechanism must be in place to ensure this. He further stated that in the last four years, DST, DBT, Atal innovation mission, start-up India movement at Invest India have given a major thrust to start-up ecosystem. The AGNIi initiative (Accelerating Growth of New India’s Innovations) co-chaired by Cabinet Secretary and PSA has been launched so as to handhold the start-ups till commercialization and help propel India into a new era of inclusive socio-economic growth. He also highlighted that many opportunities are available today for start-ups to collaborate because of the National Missions such as Namami Ganga Mission, Swatch Bharat Mission and the Health Mission. Besides, there are many Science/ Knowledge/ Technology Missions that provide an ample opportunity for start-ups such as Deep Ocean Mission, Mission on large scale sequencing of genome of Indian population that would help in making major bio-bank decisions and Translation Mission that involves dynamic and constant mechanisms for translating all the text books in bilingual language to make science democratizable. He encouraged startups to come forward for collaborating in these and such other missions.

The winners are:

Top Startups in Manufacturing:

Cyient Limited Award Winner -  Ethereal Machines Private Limited

Godrej & Boyce Mfg. Co. Ltd. Award Winner -  Asquared Iot Private Limited

Larsen and Toubro Award Winner - Fabheads Automation Private Limited

Pratiksha Trust Award Winner - Evlogia Eco Care Private Limited

TATA Steel Award Winner - Innocule Materials and Additives Private Limited

Top Start- up in Services

Bharti Airtel Award Winner - Uncanny Vision Solutions Private Limited

Top Start- up in Agriculture and Food

PI Industries Award Winner - BharatRohan Airborne Innovations Private Limited

Top Start- up in Pharma and Biotech

Jubilant Life Sciences Award Winner - Cerelia Nutritech Private Limited

Top Women Start-ups

Godrej Consumer Products Ltd. Award Winner - Eventuate Innovations Pvt Ltd

Infosys Limited Award Winner - Bioscan Research Private Limited

JCB Limited Award – TrashCon Labs Private Limited

Grand Jury of CII Startupreneur Awards 2018

S Gopalakrishnan, Chairman, Grand Jury & Chairman, CII Start-up Council

Rajan Navani, Chairman, CII Future Businesses Council

Prof Milind Atrey Institute Chair Professor, IIT Bombay

Anu Acharya Co-Chair, Start-up Council & CEO, Mapmygenome India Ltd

Srinivas Kollipara, CEO, T Hub

V Ganapathy, CEO and Co-founder, Axilor Ventures

Alok Mittal Angel Investor & Co-founder, Indifi

Karan Mohla Executive Director, Chiratae Ventures (formely IDG Ventures India)

Rajat Tandon President, IVCA

Arun Ramchandani Vice President, Larsen & Toubro

Deepak Padaki Executive Vice President - Group Head - Corporate Strategy and Chief Risk Officer, Infosys

Jawaid Ashraf Executive Vice President - Human Resources, JCB India

Jayanta Banerjee CIO, Tata Steel

Samir Dhaga CIO, PI Industries Ltd

Shyam Pattabiraman, Vice President – Chairman Office, Jubilant Life Sciences

Suchitra Royroth, Vice President (Operations), Cyient DLM

Shilpa Gupta, Vice President (Public Policy & Corporate Communications), Chairman, Bharti Enterprises

Zurvan Marolia Sr. Vice President - Product Supply, Godrej Interio

3 December 2018

New Delhi