Any new startup needs a lot of resources and mentoring in order to be successful, especially in its early stages. This initial phase builds a strong base on which the future of the company is built. For this, incubators and accelerators are just the right entities who hand-hold these young entities in these crucial early shaky years to turn a startup a successful company.
Joining the ranks is Siemens, who this week announced the launch of a new incubator called Next47 in India for IoT-based startups. Here’s a closer look:
Siemens Next47
Siemens has had plans for a long time to set up a base in India for incubating technology startups and was reportedly scouting for opportunities to invest in the country.
With the Next47 incubator program, Siemens wants to invest a significant part of its $1 billion investment fund for startups globally. It aims to set up its digital services and consultancy arm with an IoT team of about 4,000 experts, along with software experts. This team will be collaborating with teams around the globe to conceptualise, develop, test and bring-to-market applications in the areas of smart urban infrastructure, digital enterprise, connected mobility, future of energy and AI.
The company is going to use its IoT platform that has advanced technology, domain know-how and an inclusive innovation ecosystem to support India into this new and demanding space of IoT.
India will play an important role in the global digitalisation strategy of Siemens as the solutions developed in India will complement work done at the MindSphere Application Centers in Pune, Noida and Gurgaon where software developers, data specialists and engineers help develop digital innovation for data analysis and machine learning.
Incubator Programs In India
With the Indian population emerging with many startups dedicated to IoT-enabled solutions and many startups are potential and not being able to help, these incubator programs largely help to encourage these startups. Many tech giants have launched their incubator programs in the country in recent times. Here are some of the major incubator programs:
1.This year, with a focus on technology startups who are developing innovative IoT solutions for AgriTech, CleanTech, CivicTech and HealthTech, The Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), in partnership with CISCO had announced the first edition of the IoT Innovation Accelerator programme.
2.The Qualcomm Design in India Challenge – 2019 is a continuation of the initiative by Qualcomm that was started in 2016 to encourage design houses and product companies to invent useful and innovative hardware product designs incorporating Qualcomm chipset platforms and technologies.
3.Intel India, Department of Science & Technology (DST), Govt. of India and Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE), IIT-Bombay have collaborated to launch an incubation program for hardware and systems startups, called Plugin.
4.Cisco LaunchPad brings together Cisco technologies, startups, and the partner community to deliver business-relevant end-to-end Digital Solutions.
5.The program is open to mid-to-late stage technology and technology-enabled B2B/B2B2C startups. The program focuses on Cisco’s core technology areas of Security, IoT, and Video.
