Incubators fail to take off in Visakhapatnam

Visakhapatnam: The concept of Startup Village to incubate the startups by providing physical infrastructure and mentoring to help them build their ideas into products has not clicked in Vizag compared to other cities.

This is evident from the fact that the MobME Wireless Solutions, the industrial partner that was managing the Startup Village at Rushikonda IT Park has shifted most of its team members to Bengaluru. It is now limiting itself to providing the digital incubator platform to the startups through www.sv.co.

Earlier, MobME was managing the physical infrastructure of the startup incubator. After observing the progress of the Startup Village and the main challenges over a year, MobME Solutions has decided to first promote startup culture in schools and colleges through its online mentoring programme.

Some startups however, opined that the online mentoring plan would not be effective for the early startups. The Startup village is lagging behind to meet its target of launching 1,000 successful startups in 10 years.

“We need to have home grown talents to ensure local startups with innovative ideas. This calls for long term thinking where we need to promote the startup culture in school, colleges and universities to create the talent pipeline,” said Sanjay Vijayakumar, MobME CEO.

“The comparison is always there. The resources we had to put in Kerala were much higher than what has been invested in Andhra Pradesh and results are directly proportional to investments made. The undivided AP had seven incubators while the new state had none. The division has taken AP around 15 years behind Hyderabad. I am very confident that once the world class incubator scheme and the entrepreneurship policy at universities are rolled out, we will be picking up the pace in Vizag,” he added.