 We would like to start at the very beginning and that is how did you even think of starting a business incubator in IIT? The history of business incubation actually is interwind with the history of the school of IIT. So let me roll back a bit and tell you about the events that were happening then. As is well known we had a very strong department of computer science but many of us felt that the computer science research was primarily targeted internally and nobody was taking care of core research requirements in applied areas because computer has application in practically every field. The name information technology was coined well then and there is nothing specifically happening which would support the IIT research. So we had felt the need for an entity which will spearhead the applied research in the institute. When we are contemplating setting of a school of IIT we said that the school must also take certain initiatives which could be very valuable in activities which are considered critical and crucial going forward for the nation. One of them was distance education by which the IIT style education could be spread across to engineering colleges. And the other was to kindle the spirit of entrepreneurship. If you recall after the early 90's when the country embraced free market economy it was essential to unshackle the entrepreneurship spirit. Indians have always been good at it but if you notice that in this century the well generation mechanisms will be increasingly knowledge dependent and therefore to participate in this new knowledge economy we felt that entrepreneurship must grow in the area of IIT and the related fields. In fact when we were contemplating these notions we had a visit from Kamal Rekhi in early 1998 and when we exchanged our thoughts with him he appeared to be more keen on the business incubation idea than the idea of the school. Since he understood that both will go hand in hand he agreed to support the school. And while the academic curriculum was being set up for the school the senate and board had approved the establishment of the school we started working on the setting up of business incubation. The way business incubation has worked everywhere else mostly in the United States and Europe is that these incubators typically charge money for the facilities that they provide where an office space and the related experimental facilities are provided and the startup companies develop their products and start working on their early businesses from there. So that was the model that we had in mind when we started our thinking. So that will be consistent not a problem. You want to rewind the tape? So don't you say they do Fatmaar in the movie Tech 2 Stars or something like that. So which years are we talking about what was actually the time period? The actual IIT business incubator started working informally in 1999 and it was formalized in 2000. And the thinking about it started in late 97 when we are contemplating setting up the school of IIT and one of the two new initiatives that we are planning to be started in the school of IIT one was the distance education program and the other was business incubation. Since it was school of IIT we dubbed it as a pilot IIT business incubator. What we wanted to do was we wanted to capture the entrepreneurship spirit that we had seen in the West particularly in the Bay Area in United States where young talented technologies were building small technologies and products and actually creating huge value by providing solutions to problems that emerge newly in the internet era. And towards that end we said it would be nice if the talent pool within IIT itself could be enthused to take up entrepreneurship as an option rather than just taking jobs which is what most of the students were doing. Kamal Rekhi was the first supporter for the school approved of this idea very much and that is how we started planning for it. Could you tell us a bit more about the actual setting up because we have heard a lot of things about how it was in the physics department and actually okay the physics department came much later. We were wondering exactly what should be the modus operandi it was very obvious that we would seek business plans and technology plans from young startup companies and then we will evaluate those plans and we will admit people for the incubation. The model that we had in mind was that we will charge the incubating companies a certain sum of money on a monthly rental basis providing them with all the infrastructure and so on. We had worked out that the cost per company would be about 6 lakh rupees a year kind of thing including the initial infrastructure. A great impetus to this idea was received when there was a special event that was organized in 1998 TechFest, TechFest as you know is the most popular technical festival in the country and IIT Bombay students annually organized it. In that particular year a small group of enthusiastic students who wanted to capture the idea of entrepreneurship started an event called Eureka. In fact I have a small photograph of the team which we called the dream team I do not know whether your camera can capture this. This is the team of students led by Professor Chandorkar of electrical engineering department I also participated a little bit in that and this event Eureka turned out to be an extremely popular event where large number of business plans were submitted as a part of the competition. In fact one of the first two companies to start their activities in our business incubator was started by a student Roshan Desilva whose team had won actually an award in the first Eureka competition. So spread by this initiative we found out that the youngsters were capable of actually coming up with solid plants which were viable plants both in terms of technology development and in terms of business opportunities and we are encouraged by that. The school of IIT as you will know was started in the then computer science department annex which was in the maths department ground floor. The school was given a small space there it had 6 faculty cabins and we had only 3 faculty members then. So we decided to use 2 of the faculty cabins these were small dingy 10 by 10 rooms and we decided to convert them into business incubator companies. And when we asked for the suggestions plants and applications we are inundated with requests. I remember the first after the first filtering we still had about 10 companies which appeared to be sort of good proposals. Then curious happened then which forced us to change some of our actual operational plans for running the incubator. Remember what I said that we will we decided to charge the company is a certain fees for the infrastructure that we provided for the running expenses working out to be about 6 lakh rupees a year. We decided that we admitted companies will stay for one year after which time either we will review and permit them to stay some somewhat longer if they showed a chance of success or we will ask them to quit. And of course successful companies could quit earlier if they want. This model I thought was a reasonable model till I had a request from one of the 10 companies which we were evaluating the leader of that company said sir my father would like to meet you and I said fine so I agreed to meet with him. The next day when he came and he started showing the usual worry that the Indian middle class shows when the youngsters try something fancy in the family instead of taking up a solid job. So he says sir in car venture fail ho jayega to kya karengi. So I said well if they try for one year and if they fail after all they have B.Tech degree from IIT Bombay they can always get a good job. And the experience which they will gain in trying out this venture would be immensely valuable to them. So he says but it costs a lot of money so I said look 3 partners are pairing in and is it not possible for the families to arrange a loan for say 2 lakh rupees per person which will meet the expenses for a year. He peacefully said yes that is possible but what we are worried about is suppose the venture fails. I said as I said he will get a job. He said that's alright sir but if this young chap starts a job after failing and wasting one year and that too he starts with a loan of 2 lakh rupees on his head who will marry him. That shocked me actually. It told me for the first time that the social stigma associated with failure in India particularly in the Indian middle classes is very very significant. And I think that is one of the reasons why many youngsters are discouraged from taking rest with their life. Because the cost of failure in terms of the social stigma is too heavy while the cost of failure in terms of money alone may not be much. So I thought about this and I realized that the model of charging people will not work because the Indian startups particularly those which we select or otherwise have good plans and all they just can't start. So I went back to Kamal Rekhi and Nandan Nilekhani. Nandan was the other supporter of the school of IT and told them that I have a marriage problem. They could not first understand it. Both of them laughed at this when I recited the incidents and they asked me what do I propose to do. So I said I have a different proposal. I will not charge any money for the first year from the startup companies but instead I will hold a stake in that company. So let's say a 3% stake. I will hold stake in that company and hopefully when the company does well, okay, when they do a billion dollar IPO, I will get a lot of money. If they don't do well and fail, that's okay, that is participation. Both of them approved of the scheme wholeheartedly. The only hitch was that to start the incubator to give people real facilities, we needed real money. So what Nandan graciously did is out of his donation for the school of IT, he said you can use some set of substantial money for setting up the incubator and running it operationally in the initial period. So we decided to change the scheme because we are buttressed with this money. In fact, it is with that money that we set up the first set of equipment in those two rooms which we have got and the incubator started functioning formally in 1999 in that place. But in the ground floor of the maths department where we had these rooms, but it was very obvious to us that the facilities are very inadequate and we would like to incubate at least 10 companies at a time to matter somewhat. At that time, the new building of the school of IT was starting to get constructed and it was still a year, year and a half away. So we wanted to sustain this initiative because of the tremendous response that we got from people and therefore I circulated a request to all heads of the department then saying that the newly set school of IT is looking for temporary space to set up such incubator. Initially, of course, people were reluctant to give any spare space and then I said that look the infrastructure that will build including the air conditioned offices and the furniture and the computers, we will leave behind. And this enthused the physics department. The physics department head, Professor Puntam Becker then had a faculty meeting with some senior colleagues and said this is agreeable. So they gave us a lab where Professor Patel used to have his office and we converted that lab. Mr. Arvind Patel who was the project manager for the infrastructure development, spent a lot of time getting that facility up and running in less than 3 months time. And we had about 5 or 6 offices there. So that is what is remembered by the people as the incubator. Although the first incubator started in the computer science department in those 2 faculty cabins as I said but because that space was in the physics department it was visible to people, the incubator activities flourished there. In 2000 when the building of the school of IT was substantially completed we shifted the incubator to the offices that were constructed on the 4th floor for specifically for the business incubator. In fact the pilot incubator along with the distance education plan were inaugurated on the same day both Kamal Rekhi and Nandan Nilek were present and I think the inauguration happened at the hands of Professor MGK Menon, then Chairman of the Board of Governors. So that is the sort of early part of the infrastructure development. I also wanted to ask you about the various people who were involved in this because I am sure a lot of people must, I mean faculty and. The initial involvement of faculty was slightly in the background. So many faculty members will you know provide support advice and so on but by and large the initial plans came from start-ups which were created either by the students or students who had just passed out or were about to pass out but the major help we got you see when people make proposals, technology proposals we can evaluate whether there is any merit whether the technology can be developed or not. But business plans okay while myself, Professor Saada and several others were involved with the corporate world for quite some time and therefore we had some idea of whether the business plans would succeed or not we wanted waiting to be done. Additionally, we wanted some kind of mentoring to happen for the companies which were admitted to the incubator. Substantial help was received initially from the Indus Entrepreneurs Mumbai chapter. Thai had set up Mumbai chapter then they were chapter set up in Delhi and Bangalore also subsequently but the early chapter members of the Thai chapter notably Ashank Desai who set up Maastec founder and Harish Mehta who was one of the NASCOM founders and several other people helped us tremendously in the early days. So they would cross check our evaluation of the business plans, they would advise whether this plan will work or not, whom to admit and so on. As a matter of fact I remember a key incident when the first company to come in was the right half dot com Kashyap Deora's company and I had taken all these partners of that company to a dinner hosted by Mr. Kamath of ICICI bank in honor of all the visiting successful entrepreneurs from the Bay Area. So Laxwas Patil was there, I think Jagdish was there, Kamal Rekhi was there, Ashank was there, a lot of people I will try and see if I can locate that photograph. So in that meeting I formally handed over the first company for mentoring to the Thai Mumbai chapter and that was in a very crucial conglomeration of the banking sector led by Mr. Kamath himself incidentally ICICI, CIDB, State Bank all of them have shown great propensity over the years to support such incubation activities. So that was I think almost a hallmark event immediately thereafter Myzeus which was the second company by Roshan Disil was started. But if you look at the people who were involved directly the people involved were our own team myself Arvind Patil was there, Poynibat who is currently with Sine had made her first appearance there, the Thai chapter members as I said in the external world, a very key person whose involvement came through a very interesting episode which I would like to relate when I was examining one of the applicants, the application said that the applicants were from Pune, they were from Aluna and they said their advisor is one Dr. Lagu. Of course the person who came with that application did not know that I had known Lagu fairly well. It so happens that Dr. Lagu was our own student one of our favorite students in fact batch of 78 subsequently went to industry finished his PhD and came back it actually was a faculty member in IIT he was our colleague in electrical engineering department for some time and then he had gone to Pune to set up his own company mostly in digital signal processing so without telling that Aluna say anything about this that student I just told him that I want to meet your technical advisor. So we promptly set up a meeting and Dr. Lagu came from Pune all the way so I asked him sarcastically so what is happening to your company he says no specific the company is doing all right but there is nothing new happening nothing exciting happening and managers are able to run it so this I thought was a very interesting thing and I always wanted to promote and support entrepreneurship so I thought I will advise them. So I made an offer why do you want to advise only one company we are going to have 5, 10, 15 companies in incubator would you not like to advise them and he said how I said become an advisor to us and in fact you use this approach to spread the spirit of entrepreneurship in the campus so he thought about it because his wife has been working for an NGO and Pune and she and daughter refused to shift from Pune but it was very nice of him to have agreed to spend a week here except for the weekend when he would go back for 4 days he would be the adjunct professor in the electrical engineering department adjunct professor of entrepreneurship and for one day a week he would advise the incubator and of course these two activities were complementary. These coming here helped us tremendously because with his experience of the real world he could actually point out realistic flaws in the not only in the plans but when the companies were incubating he could advise them constantly on course correction he could connect them network with other VCs and other people and so on. So as a matter of fact practically it was he who was taking all the major decisions and running the incubator in the early days after he joined us. Without Tressa Lagu I do not see how the incubator could have succeeded to the level that it has succeeded so well today. He also suggested modification to our plans remember I said that will not charge anybody anything but will have a 3% undiluted equity perpetually he pointed out that any undiluted equity will not be liked by venture capitalists they would like to dilute your equity when they put in money. So he came up with a suggestion saying that suppose we hold 3% equity why not we do the following that if the company gets first round of funding we discharge 1% of our equity along with that money. If the company later gets second round of funding we discharge 1% more and we retain 1% for a good chance later after the company has done an IPO and so on. And this appeared more sensible this appeared more realistic I again consulted Kamal and Nandan and Nandan said Nandan liked this idea very much Nandan said that by keeping 3% all with yourself you are being greedy for some future wealth generation. However that's not the point even VCs who put in the first round of funding try to exit when the second round comes. So the idea is that you should also have some cash flow for the incubator on a perpetual basis. So this idea got endorsed and we started operating like that subsequently. Did you have any specific policy measures as such because you were admitting only IIT people connected to IIT and things like that? Yes and no we did not have any policy not to admit others at that time. Our policy merely said that any startup company which has a proposal dependent upon technology development would be considered on the merits. One of the questions that we used to ask any company wanting to join the incubator is why is it that you must be incubated in IIT Bombay only? What is it that you will get here which you will not get anywhere else? That means tell us two good reasons why your company should be incubated in IIT. So you will notice that while business plans could also be and in fact there have been many good business plans which are built around services okay. Our policy implicitly discourage that because services could be built anywhere in the world you don't have to incubate in IIT Bombay. More specifically we wanted to exploit the research potential of our labs our faculty expertise and of the work that was being done by students to be converted there. There was one more reason in the early days the incubator was not a formal entity it was still operating as part of IIT Bombay. The stock option that I mentioned that will hold 3% stock technically IIT Bombay could not hold stock because we are not permitted by the government of India to invest in any speculative instruments stocks are considered speculative. So IIT Bombay as a matter of fact even when it receives donations in the form of stock the stock must be discharged almost immediately and converted into money because we are not permitted to hold long term or make investment. As a result this 3% was hypothetical okay. There was no paper agreement that we could sign because we did not have a formal entity status there. What was then the arrangement? The arrangement was essentially an understanding between the startup company and the people in the school of IIT who run the incubator myself Lagoon which means it was more a matter of faith not a matter of legal agreement. And you would agree that people are far more comfortable on such matters of trust when they are dealing with persons whom they already know. So it is perhaps this reason more than anything else why almost all the early incubating companies in the incubator turned out to have a strong alumni participation because alumni of the institute were expected to go by the promises that they make. And I am very proud to recall that the first company Roshan De Silva's company Myzeuse when they left the incubator subsequently he built a very large business in Middle East and that is a different business altogether. But recently when he met me he remembered that promise made and he said that sir while I am not working on Myzeuse anymore but Myzeuse is operating in India and I would be very glad to make a contribution back to the institute as I had promised. The second company the right half dot com company which Kashyap Deva started that company was taken over by purpleyogi.com of United States which was set up by Rakesh Mathur and when Kashyap Deva told him about this condition Rakesh called us one day from US and said sir I understand and appreciate the promise made by this company. So I am giving the equivalent shares as donation to IIT Bombay Heritage Fund for the utilization in IIT. So you see our trust in people was vindictive it was proven to be correct. However going forward this could not be sustained on a larger scale we needed specific entity status to run these activities and this is what was then contemplated there were two changes that happened subsequently when Prasashok Mr took over as the director he while he appreciated this idea he says why are you limiting yourself only to IIT and my answer was that since the school of IIT is running the pilot business incubator we have expertise in dealing with technology plants of IIT companies. We have expertise also in understanding the business plants of IIT companies because that is what we deal with in our sponsored and consultancy projects and our corporate relations. The second reason was that these companies more or less required a low and fixed investment which was essentially as computers servers internet connection and so on as compared to a conventional engineering field for example if you were to set up a pilot plant in chemical the cost would be enormous and we would have no where we thought to support it specially given our way of charging that is 0 rupees for the first year and all facilities will be provided it was not 10M. However it did make eminent sense for the institute to run an incubator which will not say this field or that field because entrepreneurship is necessary in each and every field so consequently the institute whole lot of thinking started on building a general incubator of the kind that was envisaged here to expand further. A great thought leader and a colleague of ours process Surin Narayan who was the dean of research and development then as dean RND he promulgated whole lot of process to set up an entity and Professor Lagu of course helped a lot in that the idea was either we set up a section 25 company which is not for profit company or we set up a society we finally chose a society to be set up. So the society for innovation and entrepreneurship called sign was finally set up this society is a separate entity therefore it can hold stock in companies. So there is no more hypothetical ownership is a practical ownership now Secondly the society is governed by a board which has a large representation of IIT Bombay faculty dean RND is on the board the director is on the board and there are 3 or 4 faculty members on the board. The first chairman of the board was Ashank Desai himself. In fact I think you should collect more information about science functioning from the sign itself because it has a history of its own but with the establishment of sign we became a formal IIT business incubator and in the early days some of the work that was done helped us tremendously to become probably the leading incubator in the country this was in terms of the processes which I was telling you as Professor Lagu was setting up and it was also in terms of our experience that we get what must be done what must not be done how should you run it how should you encourage people etc. I remember one more incident when the government of India decided to plan to extend support for starting up such entrepreneurship activity they invited proposals from various IITs to provide grant and they asked for the kind of model that they were supporting. Professor Lagu represented IIT Bombay with a plan more or less on the lines of how we were running our incubator and I am glad to share this that the ministry found IIT Bombay's plan to be the best plan and in fact they suggested to all other institutions whether they would like to modify some of their plans on the lines of what IIT Bombay had suggested. So this was an acknowledgement that what we had learned and applied turned out to be indeed good in the eyes of many others. The ministry of science and technology has been supporting the sign initiative for quite some time they give money in the form of soft loan nowadays therefore we are able to even provide financial help to start up company. So not only we don't charge we do hold stock of course but we also provide soft loan which could be converted into either shares or could be paid back and this has encouraged the entrepreneurship activity further. You said that you got funds from Kamal Reiki and they were setting it up but what about the actual venture capitalists? Kamal Reiki gave funds for the school of IIT almost all his funds we utilized in building the school of IIT infrastructure. For the incubator the funds were used from the donation that Nandan gave but Kamal remained the central theme behind this. Kamal and Nandan have been supporting it at each stage. You talk of venture capitalists so how do you attract venture capitalists to such a startup which is a fidgeting body the youngsters are just coming up and so on. There is another curious incident that happened we said the first company that is rightoff.com has some maturity in terms of its product prototype and so on that they could go to the ventures but none of us had an idea of what kind of questions venture capitalists asked whether our people were ready to answer those questions or not. So Rakesh Mathur got interested in funding that company but he said let us go through a process. So a committee was appointed to evaluate their proposal for funding. This committee comprised Nandan Dilakini, Rakesh Mathur and myself and we met in I think Oberoi hotel in one room where this team made a presentation. I believe it was one of its kind at that time in the country so some press people got wind of it and one press representative was also there in that meeting and that person was asked that she should just be an observer. She should not interject anything because it is a formal affair. So they made a presentation it was a very serious presentation very serious questions were asked and so on and Rakesh Mathur asked them so how much money do we need or something like that and they said you know they would require about a crore of rupees or whatever and he says why should you need crore rupees some haggling they said all right 40 lakh should be good enough some such numbers were talked about and then after they left Rakesh said that I would like to pick up a 20% stake in this to help them and let us decide the company's valuation at certain value. Then the person from the press at that time interjected and asked that but how did you come to this valuation this is a very crucial question just to tell you how things happen is that whenever a company goes to VC venture capital is for funding they will actually evaluate the company so what is the value of the product what is the value of the business plan what are the chances of their revenue how much value are they will do themselves this valuation is done on the basis that supports the company later on does an initial public offering and shares go to the market what is the market capitalization that those shares will fetch that is the final value now that value at the time when they go to the market 2 years later could be completely different you have to anticipate that value and evaluate that company today and that is called the current valuation and this valuation is done on very many set parameters and so on and what that lady was shagging to find out that we were not discussing those parameters at all so Nandan told her a very key point I think he made he says that look we have been doing this business Rakesh and I have been doing this Phatak is aware of these things and most probably if we spend a week of very serious valuation this is exactly what we are likely to come out with because a lot of valuation is based on the gut feel this is what we are likely to come out with the reason we are not going through that process is that the purpose here is completely different this is the first of its kind happening in India okay we have gone through all the formal notions they have been made to make a formal presentation they have done more of the valuation than us but the fact of life is none of the three people here are interested in making money out of this right he says the purpose of these three people coming together here is to give a significant boost to the entrepreneurship in this country particularly from technology startups not from establishment and he says that is the reason why so oh she says then then she understood that so she understood for example that what was being done is the need for cash flow was being estimated that need was being made that need was being converted into 20% funding by Rakesh Matul and Rakesh Matul was willing to pick up that Rakesh as you know is a successful entrepreneur when he set up jungly.com and has been a great spirited supporter of these activities here so that was our first VC funding round that we made for this but subsequently when Prasar Lagu particularly came in he came on the board immediately thereafter and we started training our startups on preparing for valuations we started exposing them to multiple VCs so VCs would come and give talks here and so on. Nowadays of course the VC community understands the value of the company incubating in IIT Bombay and I think that itself gives those companies a little extra valuation when they go to the VC. Any bottlenecks any difficulties in the whole process roadblocks? I mean the only roadblock was the early non-availability of infrastructure and so on which we could as came through but I'm very glad and almost proud to say that IIT Bombay gives an environment where absolutely nothing came in the way absolutely nothing came in the way firstly we are not using government money the money being used was donated by someone secondly there is a great ethos of experimentation that always existed any faculty member wanting to do something new was actually if not actively encouraged it was never discouraged so that helped secondly a whole lot of faculty members on the campus and students were looking at this new experiment with great amount of curiosity with great amount of expectation and that helped a lot I had conducted a series of seminars to appraise faculty members of what is being happening and so on there were some serious questions raised and those questions were important questions that if the startups are set up by the existing students then what happens to their academics and we now have very specific rules even those days for example if people had backlogs okay we would not encourage them to do that they must have had a brilliant academic career that is now a formal rule that if a student has to be a part of the startup company then the academic record must be blemishless. MIT follows a different principle if a student wants to startup he can or Stanford for example they can take a leave of absence go away for a year participate in that and come back if they wish to we have we do not have that model for students we have now in sign introduced that model for faculty members because one of the important priorities for sign today is to encourage commercialization of IIT research and to that extent we actively want our faculty members who have the entrepreneurial inkling in their mind and have good applied research if they wish to set up a company they can actually make an application as a matter of fact today you will find most of the sign companies incubating typically have a faculty member as a partner in that company so faculty members today in IIT can take a sabbatical leave for a year become CTOs in their own companies and contribute then if they wish they can leave but most of them come back to the faculty positions having handed over the mental of running that company to the CEO and other people so that model is working out very well. Also the fact that the business incubation center is in IIT how do you think that is how much difference do you think that makes from other business incubators how different is it you see if it is only a plain business incubator and has no technology component in it then the incubator can exist anywhere even there I would think that an incubator existing in an academic institution is a win-win situation because it gives an intellectual environment to the people who run the startup companies that intellectual environment in the early days is very vital where problems are getting solved minds have to be applied to the problem and where else can you see such a conglomeration of highly intelligent people who are willing to spare time to apply their mind to problem solution in particular if the startup companies have a technology product development then I believe they must exist either within or close by to an academic technical institution where the laboratories of that technical institution the faculty members doing research in that technical institution are readily available and accessible for solving problems which are invariably faced by the startup companies when they are trying to develop a product see all of them start with an idea they do not even have a prototype when they start developing prototype on one hand they require a development team but on the other hand there are hard technical problems that they face in particular if the idea itself is based on some cutting edge research which has happened recently either in that institution or elsewhere then to take it forward you require equally capable people who will solve any hard problems that may come in the way and while those problems can be solved anywhere in the world but the time that it will take elsewhere will be enormous I think it makes a lot of sense for such incubators particularly which have as a part of a crucial part of their plan development of a technology or development of a technology product the ideal place for the incubator to exist is within an academic institution so the BI in the IT school became sign yes and what do you see the future of sign as sign today is acknowledged and we are although we would with all humility we would like to state this but we are also very proud to say that sign is acknowledged as the best incubator in the country today and there are other incubating examples that are coming up IIT is all IIT is IISC IISC has a beautiful technology incubator IIMs have started doing that going forward my own dream is that incubating 8 or 10 or 15 companies at a time is not good enough for the size of the prospective entrepreneurs that this country has in IIT itself I envisage setting up of a of a much larger infrastructure and facility where we could incubate as many as 50 companies at one time okay simultaneously after these companies graduate there should be a place nearby in the city some kind of an S&T park where they could get out of incubator and face the real world but they would still get a technology environment in which they could set up their company and shop much like the infotec parks and so on that is for IIT Bombay that is good but that is not sufficient so I would expect at least 100 such incubators to be set up in 100 engineering institutions in the country at various places because if you ask me both the talent and the entrepreneurship spirit exists across every nook and corner of the country and there is no reason to believe that if young people from whether it is Bhuvaneshwar or Jharsugula or in in Lodhiana in Punjab or Jodhpur or Valodhara would not come up with some fantastic products and ideas just like people in IITs do as a matter of fact you will notice that there are many well-known engineering institutions in the country you take MS University Valodhara college of engineering Pune or the JNTU Hyderabad or there is so many every state has one or two colleges which has contributed a significant number of entrepreneurs to the society you know there they start up some business some product making in their own field whether it is electronics whether it is mechanical engineering etc etc how nice it would be if the cutting edge technology development could be made a theme of entrepreneurship in all such institutions so I am looking forward to 100 such incubating centers in the country and I am looking forward to a much larger facility in IIT itself which could incubate may be 50 companies we have taken some steps in that direction during the golden jubilee year we already have a commitment from none other than the well known industrialist Mr. Rahul Bajaj who was also our ex chairman of board of governors who has donated a million dollars to set up a innovation center we want to build a larger infrastructure around it hopefully sign will move into that over the next few years also sir you set up your influential in setting up something called the e-cell I would not take credit of setting up the e-cell but it has a very interesting history and it is the history is intrinsically interwind with the incubation activities so I will tell you how it came about remember I told you about the dream team which ran the event called Eureka which was a part of the tech fest it was soon realized the Eureka even continued by the way even today it continues but it was soon realized that making Eureka a part of tech fest actually restricts its importance in the sense that Eureka is about entrepreneurship whereas tech fest is about the huge challenges in technology events and competitions and so on so a group of students felt that also the model that we had in the first Eureka competition was various business plans were submitted and the competition was held along with the tech fest whereas if you see anywhere in the world a serious business plan competition undergoes several stages of evaluation so people go from one stage to the next stage the winning people at certain stage are given a chance to modify their proposals and send them and so on so we decided to go through that and the students body felt that it should be a separate organization which should support entrepreneurship in a general sense this caused the formation of e-cell Professor Lagu participated very enthusiastically in the early advice and support to this cell a great boost to the sale came when Vatvani foundation started their national entrepreneurship network in India NEN that incidentally is a very very important activity and is completely complementary to whatever little we have done and that activity has a potential to take the entrepreneurship to large number of centers in the country so this national entrepreneurship cell was set up in India with five founding institutions and these five founding institutions were selected by Vatvani foundation after a visit to more than 20 prospective candidates so all IITs were visited all irons were visited smaller institutes were visited and curiously IIT Bombay is the only IIT which was chosen as a founding IIM Amdabad is another founding institution there is a management institute in Mumbai there is an institute in Bangalore and Bit Spillani these were the five institutions of course this is not not to be little the efforts being done at other places but this was the founding group this group realized the great potential that e-cell has and in fact they tried to model e-cell like organizations in each of the founding institutions and elsewhere so e-cell has grown enormously in both the work that they do and the contributions that they make it is acknowledged by NEN and we have an ongoing funding relationship with NEN so NEN funding usually has a component to support e-cell activities so that is how it is today e-cell is a large organization by itself my own wish of course is that I would like to have a greater synergy between e-cell activities and tech-fest activities for the simple reason that when tech-fest is held every year in January, February there are 30,000 engineering students from all over the country who come here and I think is a great opportunity for IIT Bombay to inject the entrepreneurship spirit amongst as many of the 30,000 as is possible I personally feel that we are missing that opportunity by e-cell conducting its activities independent of tech-fest so if there is at least some kind of a coordination where in the tech-fest event there is a significant presence of e-cell through activities to encourage participation I think that would be useful.