Come March, and the country’s first technology business incubator in the private-public-partnership mode will launch its ‘mentoring calendar’ initiative. In the programme, IT stalwarts from the Silicon Valley and India’s leading Internet entrepreneurs will offer lesson plans to those incubated at the Startup Village here.

“This will be one of the major programmes to be launched in 2015. The aim is to provide the young founders of start-ups an opportunity to interact with mentors and learn from their rich experience,” said Pranav Kumar Suresh, Chief Executive Officer of Startup Village.

Explaining that the mentoring programme would be extended over a period of 10 weekends, Mr. Suresh pointed out that there were several issues that the young entrepreneurs needed to learn. “They may not know the intricacies of how to negotiate with an investor. Sometimes issues may crop up between a founder and co-founder or they may fall into a confused state after realising that the initial goals have not been met. Only a successful entrepreneur would be able to clear their doubts through the proposed face-to-face sessions,” he said.

Expanding space

Racing ahead of their expected target of incubating 1,000 start-ups in 10 years, the Startup Village will host 250 to 300 more ventures by next September.

Currently, over 50 start-ups are housed in the village located at the Technology Innovation Zone in the Kinfra Park. Work to add about 1.5 lakh sq.ft to the existing space is expected to be over in eight to nine months.

Chief Minister Oommen Chandy had recently opened an additional 10,000 sq.ft to the existing 15,000 sq.ft in the expanding incubator in view of the growing number of youngsters launching unique and innovative start-ups.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Kochi /  by G. KrishnaKumar / Kochi – December 11th, 2014