NITI Aayog, SAP Labs India collaborate to accelerate the start-up ecosystem

Aiming to significantly strengthen and catalyse the plethora of Indian incubators and start-up ecosystem, a partnership between AIM, NITI Aayog and SAP Labs, India plans to equip young talent with advanced digital skills, experiential STEM education, and expertise to drive socio-economically relevant innovation at a young age. The partnership aims at facilitating, coaching and mentoring students in advanced technology topics like electronics, mechatronics, Internet of Things, digital skills, and coding, which allows them to gain explicit experience. It will also help in boosting incubation centres, enhance the capacity development and provide acceleration support to the youth entrepreneurs. It will also provide mentoring support to start-ups and facilitate pilots with the youth-led start-ups. 

The Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) is the government of India’s flagship initiative to promote innovation and entrepreneurship in the country aimed at revolutionising the innovation ecosystem. Atal Tinkering Laboratories (ATLs) create innovators and Atal New India Challenges takes these innovations to the market and shall be provided with a network of incubators shall help create enterprises around these innovations. The Atal Tinkering Laboratories was introduced by NITI Aayog under the AIM to build skill sets among the youth and provide them access to technology. AIM has selected 10,000 schools to establish these labs, covering 93% of total districts and 98% of upcoming smart cities. They seek to expand to every district in the country, to enable a conducive ecosystem for technological growth, innovation, and evolution. 

SAP (Systems Applications and Products in Data Processing) being the market leader in enterprise application software provides insight and cultivates collusions to help organisations remain competitive. Through ML and IoT they help turn businesses into intelligent enterprises. It enables more than 440,000 business and public customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and make a difference. With a global network of customers, partners, employees, and thought leaders, SAP helps the world run better and improve people’s lives. SAP will conduct Training of Trainers (ToT) under UnBox Tinkering (workshop program under ATL) for around 500 teachers in the next three years. SAP aims to adopt 100 Atal Tinkering Laboratories and impart digital education to 30,000 students from the states of North East, Uttar Pradesh, and Karnataka.