T-Hub, which is among the biggest startup incubators in India, is now looking to encourage student entrepreneurship. Hyderabad-based T-Hub has launched T-Tribe academic membership programme to help student entrepreneurs develop their ideas. The programme through its Launchpad offering will offer one-year entrepreneurship platform at colleges and universities having incubation or e-cells. The incubator will partner with colleges from various states and will set-up T-Tribe centres in partnership with these institutes while training and workshops will be organised by the incubator at regular intervals in these universities.
T-Tribe will also offer ‘Master Class’ to more than 70 student innovators and aspiring entrepreneurs in terms of mentoring. Subject matter experts and industry mentors at T-Hub. will help students to build their ideas into viable business propositions during the four-month pre-incubation programme. “During such unprecedented times of a global crisis, there is a need to create a strong innovation-driven culture among student innovators and aspiring entrepreneurs in academic institutions,” said Ravi Narayan, CEO, T-Hub.
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The Launchpad initiative will also guide colleges on running an incubation programme while giving students access to founders, startups, corporates, others. Under Master Class, student entrepreneurs will be able to connect with T-Hub startups for possible testing of their solutions and would also help in raising funding from T-Hub’s investor network.
The first batch of the shortlisted students will undergo mentoring from next month. T-Hub had run a pilot of the T-Tribe programme last year with multiple institutes including Vignana Bharathi Institute of Technology Hyderabad (VBIT), Malla Reddy College of Engineering and Technology (MRCET), KL University, MLR Institute of Technology etc.
Encouraging student entrepreneurship is one of the focus areas for the Narendra Modi government. According to the National Innovation and Startup Policy 2019 for Students and Faculty, the institutions will have to allocate a minimum 1 per cent of their total annual budget towards entrepreneurial activities that should be a part of the institutional financial strategy. The allocated amount has to be allocated to fund and support innovations and startups through the creation of a separate ‘Innovation Fund’, according to the policy guidelines.
