 Business Technology Industrial Research Assistant Council, BIRAC in partnership with Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms, C-CAMP, has set up the BIRAC Regional Entrepreneurship Centre, BIRAC, with an objective of encouraging the spirit of bio-entrepreneurship, facilitating the creation of life-sign startups and mentoring startups to increase their chances of success. This partnership holds a lot of potential and can be a real game changer. Let's meet the Program Lead for BIRAC Dr. Bhavishawala and know more about this initiative. To know more about BIRAC Regional Entrepreneurship Centre, we have with us Program Lead Bhavishawala. Welcome Bhavishawala. We'd like to begin with trying to know more about your centre and the kind of work it's doing. So, BREC, it stands, BREC stands for BIRAC Regional Entrepreneurship Centre that has been established at C-CAMP along with BIRAC. So, it has been established in 2017 and since past six years, we are doing various programmes which helps bio-entrepreneurs, academics and life sciences students and startups. So, what are the aims and objectives with which this institution was formulated? BREC was formed with the aim to help bio-entrepreneurship pan India and the programmes that are designed are according to the programmes are designed to mentor, equip and to help bio-entrepreneurs to move forward and take their ventures at global level and at national level. Why and when was the need to have such an institution felt here and like how did the idea came up? So, the idea came up because there was a gap or need which was formed or it was identified I can say that the students or the academics and startups when they have their bio-venture then they realise that they are scientists basically and they don't know so many non-technical things that they need to know. They have a brilliant idea which they think that can be converted to a venture but then for non-technical things they do require help. So, the idea behind forming BREC was to help students and startups to bridge this gap of non-technical specialties that they require. That was a good thought at that particular point really served the purpose I guess and we'd like to know more about the activities and what all programmes this place is running. So, BREC if we can divide into two portions like there are some programmes which are for students and some programmes are focused only for startups. Okay, so in in case of students for that category what are we doing for students in this? So, for students we have entrepreneurship awareness programme and advanced awareness workshops. So, in entrepreneurship awareness programmes we do a half-day programme for life sciences students where we explain them about the ecosystem that how the life sciences ecosystem incubators work and what kind of help they can get from incubators and we also have IP talk intellectual property talk that if they have an idea then how to protect that and not to publish it and then we have a talk by young entrepreneur to motivate them that how they started their journey and where they are now and the types of grants that they received from government or state and we also have an expert who tell their journey and this is also like a motivational talk that they have reached now at this stage and it will motivate students to take entrepreneurship. And what about the entrepreneurs and startups, I mean what programmes do you run for those? So, for startups we have various programmes like we have workshops. So, workshops are generally for non-technical topics like topics like knowing investor term sheet or intellectual property rights or clinical trials or maybe regulatory pathway. So, those kind of topics which a scientist is not aware about. So, once they form a startup like it is you are whole and soul for that startup. So, you need to know everything you need to know accounts, you need to know HR things, you need to know how to build a team and you are the technical person, the scientist as well, you need to know the R and D as well. So, for all these things like these workshops are there that will help startups for this non-technical things which they are not aware of and these workshops are generally half to full day workshops and we conduct this at different metros of India. So, I can see a lot of knowledge dissemination happens in these workshops. So, it will be nice to know like who all you partner with so that you know all that knowledge could be brought together under one roof and be imparted to the entrepreneurs. So, who all do you partnership with for these workshops? So, for these workshops generally it is initiative of BRIC. So, our partner is Birak and Sikkim, but the people whom we call for these workshops they are the experts in their own domain. But like for partnerships like you are saying we have another program where we have partners in different industry partners who are also involved. Yeah, by partnership I also mean that the association with the kind of people. Yeah, so it is the experts generally and at Sikkim we have a huge network of mentors and experts with us because we are 10 plus years old now and our mentors and experts in their field they are the people who take these workshops. Okay, so do you also kind of organize some kind of investor meets for your startups? Yes we do. So, we have this one-on-one investor meets that we organize between investors and startups and here the investors like we have more than 30 plus investors now in our cohort and here the startups will have a closed room one-on-one meeting with investors so that it gives them the privacy to discuss things with the investors and then after investor meet like if investors and startups both are interested then we connect them and then the talk goes forward. And to prepare them for this scenario do you also organize something like boot camps or you know such events for the startups? Yes, we do. So, it was very apt that to prepare them for this because in boot camp you know like we tell them how to pitch we teach them how to do marketing. So, there are there is this once in a year boot camp that we do for startups it is a four-day residential boot camp and startups like we open the call and then on selection basis we call startups over here from 40 to 60 startups attend the boot camp and in boot camp we have almost like 10 to 15 speakers through these four days and we also have three international speakers who come for this boot camp and in boot camp we cover topics like marketing or intellectual property rights and clinical trials we also call people from regulatory related expert we call and we also teach them how to pitch we also have you know like small sessions of how to give elevator pitch so like these kind of it's very interactive and along with the sessions I feel it is more important for startup to build the peer group right and here it is the best example that we have seen is that the groups which are formed in these boot camp they are from past six years also they are still in contact and they discuss their difficulties and we are also there in the WhatsApp group so we can see that so many problems are solved between by themselves right someone has if someone needs a person who can design a certain machinery right then there will be someone in the group who can say that yes I know this person who designs this so it is like very interactive that we have seen and the groups that they form it is like the alumni or the school or college friends that we have so we have seen that relation in this boot camps okay so I can see the scope of the program that you're running is pretty wide so there must have been challenges some you know situations which you must be facing like hardships or any kind of challenge that you need to overcome to be able to you know put across a good show for all these students as the startups so what are those challenges that you come across in your routine working of the break so challenges we do face like I can say that sometimes you know students and startups they do register for such things and as all these is sponsored by Byrec we never ask any registration fees or anything from them so sometimes it is taken for granted that they do register they say that yes we will come like for example I told that in boot camp we select 50 to 60 startups so people do say that they are coming and then last moment they don't come so I feel that it's it's irresponsibility from their side they are wasting the seat of someone else so those kind of challenges we face and for students generally we have seen that some of the students like they are not you know they with enthusiasm they start but then they lack that after some time maybe because it could be because of their studies and that as well I can't comment on that so like those kind of things challenges are there but other than that we have seen a very good response and a very good feedback from all startups and students that it is something that Byrec has taken a very good initiative C camp has taken a very good initiative to do this because it is like nowhere else you will get to learn such things where they don't ask back right so it's a very good platform for startups and students as you mentioned about students yeah definitely I mean there must be some challenges because these kids these girls and boys have another activity going on in their life which is their academics so I mean I can understand it must be difficult dealing with that situation in their life so how do you really manage to you know inculcate this entrepreneurship culture in their you can say in their thinking or how do you know dispense this knowledge to them so we when we talk to students or when we go for a program for students right we do tell them that if you have anything you can approach us anytime and I what I have seen is that over the years like like you were saying that maybe they have some academic thing that there is the priority at that point but we have seen that after they finish their studies they still have this in mind that okay there is something like this ecosystem is there where I can get help so we have got some students like that as well that maybe they are not very punctual at that time but then after one year or something they approach us saying that now I have finished my studies and now I'm thinking of having a startup or maybe we friends are thinking of having this and how you can help us so like we tell them about the schemes and the grants that they can get and the initial funding seed funding they can get so yeah so are there any entrepreneurship awareness programs for them which you conduct specifically for students so we have entrepreneurship awareness programs which is just a half day but then we have entrepreneurship advanced workshops right so here what happens is that the students who are interested and who have attended our awareness programs they come for this two-day residential advanced awareness program so that we generally do it in Bangalore so they come here they visit C cam they see that how the startups are incubated how it works how the incubator works and here we cover topics like building a business model canvas or how to register a startup initial thing will be like how will you register and then you build your business model canvas what is your value proposition so all these topics are covered in this two-day advanced awareness so from there we have seen many promising students who are registering a startup and they take it seriously after that so what is the kind of impact do you think brek has been able to create in the environment of entrepreneurship or startup culture and with the people that you work with you've worked with lots and lots of people I'm sure students and startups so what impact has been created so if I talk about impact like brek has as I told you all these programs they are pan India so it's not that all the programs we do it here at our place we travel to different places in India and like the student awareness program which I told you till now in past six years we have done 30 such awareness programs and each time it has been a different corner of India and we have also covered the regions like Chhattisgarh or Arunachal Pradesh Meghalaya, Mizoram like all northeast states you know where Madhya Pradesh where the exposure is not much for students and to our surprise like some of the students they don't even know what is an incubator so our first question is like what is an incubator so like we can come to know that they don't even know the concept of this right so I feel that it has created a tremendous impact knowing about entrepreneurship knowing about the entrepreneurship ecosystem and the support that they can get from state government central government like all the policies that are there for startups for student entrepreneurs as well so they become aware about this so this is the impact on students side and if we see even academics have benefited a lot because when we go for such awareness programs in institutes then academics also so many times they are not aware that such things exist so even they have their research projects they have their phd students which can be converted into a venture which they never gave a thought because in if we see in academics like traditionally it is like you publish a paper and you will be happy right you never think of converting that into a venture so academics have benefited from this and the startups the impact that brec has created for startups is tremendous like startups from tier two tier three cities they have attended our workshops and our boot camps and so many startups where they have very less seed money to start with then it is very difficult for them to you know initially get fund to attend such programs or which are paid ones so this has helped a lot so if I tell in numbers then almost 14,880 students have been impacted through this program and we have almost 1,001 on 1 investor meets have been done till now and we have some 550 startups who have attended the boot camps right so they have gained this non-technical knowledge through boot camp and we have some this 37.8 crore of investment opportunity and cash prizes has been given through nbeck the national bio entrepreneurship competition okay so through the competitions also you are kind of you know supporting these yes startups and also can you please elaborate about any competitions and how do they work so this competition we organize this annual competition which we call nbeck in short it stands for national bio entrepreneurship competition and this competition we started in 2017 and it was for all bio entrepreneurs like anyone has idea in bio entrepreneurship can apply for this competition even if you are not a startup as an individual as an academic as a student also you can apply for this competition and in year one we had some 83 lakhs of price which has now grown to 16 crore in 2022 and what this competition is about is like we have this competition almost for three and a half to four months we open the call and we get applications almost 3000 applications from all over India and these applications go through four stages and in the fourth stage they come here to Bangalore for a two-day boot camp followed by pre-final and grand finale so here the competition has two parallel pillars I can say one is for startups and one is for students so I would like to say that we created these two separate things for students and startups only from 2020 because since 2017 we started but then three years what we saw was that the students when they compete with startups right in the final stage they all were removed so then we yes they were not getting the level play right so it was like they then in 2020 we thought of separating these two having two different tracks one for students and one for startups and individuals so from past three years we have been giving cash given cash prizes to students as well and here we have our industry partners who commit for cash prize and investment opportunity and some of the very big names like Biocon, Novozymes, Anthem, L'Oreal right if we see mehiko then Ankur seeds in agriculture side so like domain-wise we have so many partners and we also have investment partners we have investors like social alpha, IAN, Sangam, Anzia so all these investors also commit the investment opportunity and during this competition like the cash prize and opportunity is given and of course the investment opportunity after it is given after due diligence through the investors so when is this competition held and how can a person apply for this so generally the competition call opens around September sometime and it is advertised in our social media and we also do quite a lot of outreach through the institutes that we have visited and through our startups we do outreach and Finale is generally end of the year so it runs through like it has four stages like I told it runs through three and a half to four months and then Finale is in December well you can see a lot of good work is happening in the space of entrepreneurship with you guys and I hope this will continue and grow even more so what do you see the future of you know entrepreneurship on startup culture in India keeping in mind the kind of initiative you people are taking and many others in the in this space are taking so where do you see India as a startup hub in the coming few years owing to these kind of initiatives so I can say that it is a really good initiative that has been taken by Birak and Seacamp and many more other initiatives are there in India as well and this has put us you know like now we are number two or number three in websites there are some someone says India is number two someone says China is number two so I don't know but we are in the top five I can say where we have many entrepreneurs or startups coming up right so I can say that like we have put ourselves in a very good position and it is nowhere to look back it is always going forward and all these programs that central government is facilitating for startups and for students these kind of things we were not aware or even the programs were not designed in such a good way when I can say when I was doing my masters no one came and told me that if you want to be an entrepreneur you can do this right so this kind of guidance that is getting now to students and startups I think it's wonderful and it's there is like it's always going forward there's nothing to look back in yeah surely we must look forward with all this you know effort being put in and I would like to thank you so much Bhavisha for joining us today and sharing with us all these opportunities which can be availed by students and startups thank you so much and all the best for your venture thank you this was Dr Bhavisha Wala the program lead for Birak Regional Entrepreneurship Center in the coming editions we will meet some more personalities from well-known institutions who are working hard to make a difference till then goodbye