India's first public-private partnership telecom incubator to come up in KINFRA Park

KOCHI: India's first public-private partnership (PPP) telecom business incubator, 'Startup Village', is being set up on a 15,000-square feet space at the KINFRA Park in nearby Kalamassery and the first phase of the project will be inaugurated in February this year.

An agreement in this regard was signed between MobME CEO Sanjay Vijayakumar and Kerala Infrastructure Development Authority (KINFRA) Managing Director S Ramanath.

Startup Village will focus primarily on student start-ups from college campuses and would be modelled on the technology incubators in Silicon Valley. It aims to incubate 1,000 product start-ups over 10 years and start the search for a billion-dollar company from a college campus by the turn of the decade.

The National Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board (NSTEDB), Department of Science and Technology (DST), Technopark and MobME Wireless have joined hands to set up the country's first telecom business incubator, Startup Village, an Indian telecom innovation hub, KINFRA said in a press release here.

The village will create a vibrant ecosystem for start-ups to create breakthrough technologies for the global telecommunications industry.

This would be made possible through association with leading companies in the telecom sector by setting up telecom innovation zones that bring the latest technology platforms and products to the start-ups in the incubator before their release in commercial markets, Ramanath said.

Sanjay Vijaykumar told PTI that they were planning to take in 10 start-ups under a first batch by April this year, with about 30 entrepreneurs.