Tech Dev Board ties up with Nokia to create entrepreneurs

Ministry of Science and Technology's Technology Development Board (TDB) will launch a 'Knowledge to Wealth' initiative with mobile phone giant Nokia next month to encourage entrepreneurship among students in the country.

"The project will be launched within a month or so. We have already singed an agreement with Nokia for it. To start with, it will be implemented in 30 engineering colleges. Later on, it will be taken up in other colleges which have entrepreneurship promotion cells," TDB secretary Harkesh Mittal said on the sidelines of a workshop here.

Under the project, Nokia would set up Mobile Application Labs in all the 30 colleges and DST would support 60 students from each of these colleges, by paying Rs 5,000 per student per month.

Stating that the initial project cost would be Rs 4.5 crore, he said Nokia would invest Rs 3.5 crore while TDB would put in Rs one crore.

A committee has been set up with representatives of DST, DBT and Nokia to select students for the programme, he said.

"The idea behind the programme is to encourage the spirit of entrepreneurship among students. Once a student can convert his knowledge to wealth, he already becomes an entrepreneur," he said.

Mittal said that programmes on the lines of Knowledge to Wealth were already operational in some European countries where students make about 5,000 to 6,000 euros through their innovations.

"Students participating in our programme can write mobile-based applications and load them on the web. These can be loaded to a site developed by Nokia called Marketplace. The application can be bought from this website," he said.

In reply to a question, Mittal said that TDB was mainly funded through non-plan expenditure and now has a corpus of Rs 2,500 crore.

"Of this amount, we withdrew only Rs 500 crore over the last 10 years and were able to disburse Rs 1,000 crore in various projects by recycling the Rs 500 crore," he said.

Asked about future projects, Mittal said that TDB was looking at creating a research pool on technology at the IITs, besides participating in an Indo-US Endowment Fund for the innovation and development of technology.

Earlier, participating in a FICCI-sponsored workshop on Innovators on TDB Funding Schemes, Mittal said that often technological innovations did not reach the market because of bottlenecks like non-conducive 'eco-system','lack of capacity to take risks' and non-availability of good mentors.

"To mitigate this problem, we have taken a number of initiatives like creation of business incubators, tapping venture capitals and taking help from NRI entrepreneurs and exposing faculty from various institutions to some of the best mentors in the country and abroad," he said.