The Promise of 2019
In 2018, we scaled new heights and surpassed a few ambitious milestones. It’s time we look ahead into our future. The year 2019, holds immense promise and we are determined to deliver. Our tactics will evolve, but we are firmly guided by our conviction that entrepreneurship is a potent tool to solve some of India’s toughest challenges. We will redouble our efforts to empower entrepreneurs with the tools and resources required to succeed and reach scale. In 2019, we will strive to nudge entrepreneurship in India into a new growth trajectory by building stronger national ecosystems in high impact areas. We will remain committed to democratizing entrepreneurship by energising high-potential yet underserved geographies. We will ground our efforts in robust research and share it with the community to impact narratives about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship.
National Ecosystems and Catalytic Capital
While we continue to deliver on our landmark initiatives launched last year, in 2019 we want to renew our focus on emerging sectors including agritech, biotech, fintech, healthcare and enterprise solutions. We will do so by nurturing innovative applications of frontier technologies such as IoT, AI, ML, and automation to building cutting-edge products, improving efficiencies and creating new business models in these sectors. We will strengthen existing platforms and partnerships and create new ones to help early-stage enterprises validate their foundational assumptions and achieve commercial viability.
This year we will identify, invest in and provide deep support to 50 high-quality startups. We will continue to work with our existing portfolio to ensure that they take off into the echelons of success. Our deep support to startups would span across business development, raising capital, facilitating technology development, infra and support services, PR, marketing and research support.
Democratizing Entrepreneurship by supporting regional ecosystems
Pushing further on our goals of democratizing entrepreneurship, we aim to conclude the INVENT 1.0 program having supported 50 social enterprises with mentoring, grants and follow-on investments. We will now identify enterprises for further scale-up support and lead them towards Series A funding under the INVENT 2.0 program.
Incubation support has always been our priority. Banking on Innocity for regional impact, we look forward to hosting accelerators, intensive diagnostic clinics and mentoring panels across Rajasthan and Gujarat. We are committed to supporting other upcoming incubation centres and accelerators. We know that working together, we can help build incubation models that deliver on impact and quality.
Impacting the Discourse of Entrepreneurship in India
The year 2019 will be the year of entrepreneurial learning and sector intelligence at CIIE. During the last year, we have been working on a few ambitious projects aimed at enhancing entrepreneurs’ learning. In 2019, we will share with you tools developed in-house at CIIE that would equip entrepreneurs to address critical challenges they face on their quest. We would love to get feedback on these from you.
In 2019, we will continue to dive deeper into emerging and high impact sectors. During the last year, we undertook the intelligence of a few spaces in the larger sectors of agriculture, financial inclusion, energy, and mobility. The process made us realize the massive need for such rigorous and in-depth analysis in the Indian ecosystem. We are studying a few more sectors and will share the insights with you soon. We are guilty of not sharing these with you as frequently as we’d like to. We promise to right that this year.
We have our hands full and sleeves rolled up. We resolve to deliver this year. We are also massively scaling up our physical infrastructure to keep pace with the scale of our ambition! Do stop by.