Idea Incubation: Accelerate your way to success

A regular college guy going through the rigours of engineering was travelling, when he stumbled upon a word he did not know the meaning of. He had a basic phone with no Internet connectivity, and then it struck him: why can’t there be an SMS based search engine? He got together with his friends, discussed, deliberated and they were convinced that an SMS based search engine indeed made sense. Elsewhere, as a part of their college project during the placement season, two friends got together to set up a forum to conduct mock interviews, which made it easier to filter right candidates. Its effectiveness got them thinking and they realised that it had a potential of being used by big companies to select right candidates. The former went on to become the extremely successful startup SMSGyan, launched by Innoz and co-founded by four students from LBS College of Engineering, Kerala – Deepak Ravindran, Abhinav Sree, Ashwin Nath and Mohd. Hisamuddin. Today, it answers more than 2 million queries a day and more than 10 million users have availed of the service across India. While the latter is none other than InterviewStreet.com co-founded by engineers Vivek Ravisankar and Harishankaran K. Its roster includes companies like Zynga, Facebook, Amazon and even NASA. Earlier this year, the services of InterviewStreet.com were also sought by the US Government. While both undoubtedly are great business ideas, their founders believe they wouldn’t have achieved half of what they have, if it were not for belief, support and mentorship that they received from the respective business accelerator they were a part of.  So what exactly are these accelerators and incubators? What’s at stake and how do they help? We find out.