Innovation. Incubation. Growth

 BITS, Pilani recently announced that students and faculty would be allowed to take a year of to go and build their own startups (read the article here).  This seems like a brilliant idea to create greater institute-industry collaboration.  At the same time this is likely to foster innovation too. This also reminded me of my days at 3i Infotech.  PREMIA, the insurance software, had established itself as a market leader in the Middle East and Africa, and plans were afoot to expand its footprint to Europe and the USA.  This vision meant that we would have to scale up significantly, both in terms of people and technology.   Here’s how we went about it:

1.      Aavishkar: An innovation forum with a contest was launched to get people to work on technological aspects that would enhance functional and technical capabilities, create integrations to third-party applications, and mobility applications.  Enthusiastic participants offered several innovative ideas, some of which were incremental, while there were some  game-changing entries too.

2.      PREMIA University: We also figured out that we would need to create a huge resource pool to support the development and implementation efforts.  PREMIA University was set up with the intention of creating a resource pool that would ensure a continuous stream of students who were familiar with the domain, and were familiar with PREMIA.   A PREMIA lab was set up at VIT, and we spent time teaching students the nuts and bolts of software implementation, including domain knowledge.   

Both these initiatives helped us scale quickly.  The PREMIA Lab we set up at some of the colleges went on to create job opportunities for students, who later went on to join some of our clients in the Middle East and Africa.  The Great Resignation has created this need to increase interaction with universities and colleges, to support and nourish innovation so that companies are able to scale up their productivity, and benefit from the huge opportunities that technological advancements are bringing up.  The BITS experiment seems to be a step in the right direction, and it would be good to see industry also step up and meet this initiative half-way.