Technology based entrepreneurship, may be the only necessary, if not sufficient, response to meet India's desire for a better quality of life for all its citizens. The two key parameters that need to be improved are the GDP per capita and employment generation - especially for young educated graduates, who deserve to earn similar salaries to those earned by their peers in the developed countries on a purchasing power parity basis. The key result area for the IIT Alumni Council and the PanIIT initiatives is the creation of a dynamic technopreneurship ecosystem which enables the achievement of this target.
Our Mission
The overall objective that needs to be met.
The Technopreneurship initiative of the IIT Alumni Council aspires to add a trillion dollars to the Indian GDP by creating one million technology businesses that contribute a million dollars each to the GDP and create ten million high paying for engineers and premium graduates by 2025-26.
Our Target
Key Result areas of the period 2021-2026
Incubation and technopreneurship: Creating the infrastructural capacity to host a million technopreneur ventures efficiently is the primary key result area. Given the constraints on capital and real estate, this infrastructure needs to optimise all the inputs required to achieve the target of an additional million technopreneur ventures using the ASPIRE framework. This target translates into at least a billion square feet of incubation and coworking space in addition a trillion dollars in venture funding. If we split this into mega clusters in the key cities and mega incubators in the district headquarters, we will need a thousand incubators of a million square feet each with a billion dollars of funding per incubator.
Capital and Capital market access: Most technocrats lack family wealth or savings. Talent without capital - with or without infrastructure - will fail. This capital is not going to come from the existing banks who have little or no capital of their own. Most large corporates end up being equity free and debt based in reality. This capital has to be raised globally and foreign investment in AIFs will play a key role, as will stock market listing. In order to access this capital, several perception and practical challenges need to be overcome. These range from successful startup and SME platforms on the indian stock markets, direct access to overseas stock markets and considerable improvement in the ease of doing business in India.
Mentoring and Skilling: Whilst we have solved the quantity issue by facilitating the production of hundreds of thousands of engineers and premium graduates annually - their calibre and employability is highly suspect. Language and soft skills continue to be a challenge as does their basic technical capability. For ten million jobs to be created at global salary levels - ten million world class employees need to be produced in five years. This is not going to happen untill and unless the existing educational system is supplemented with rapid upgradation of these engineers. The minimum requirement for each technopreneurial venture is one high quality engineer. In the next five years - the IITs will produce a total of around 0.1 million engineers whereas the need is for at least ten times that number. The calibre and skill level of the IIT Engineers themselves is not upto the mark in many cases, necessitating upgradation.

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