Budget Expectations 2024: Mr. Anand Sri Ganesh, CEO, NSRCEL, IIMB

18 Jan 2024 , 10:48 AM

The incubation ecosystem in India is at a curious cusp. There are over 1000 incubators in India today. However, very few are truly able to work with ventures to unlock innovation and create sustainable, scalable businesses. Of the over 100,000 startups incorporated in the country since 2016, less than 5% work with incubators to gain entrepreneurial expertise. Despite this, startups are estimated to contribute to 5-6% of our GDP growth. This implies we have a huge upside opportunity by upgrading Incubation capability to enable startups to truly innovate and scale. On the other hand, the incubation ecosystem runs the risk of becoming irrelevant to the startup ecosystem beyond being incidental contributors. Both scenarios have played out in other entrepreneurship ecosystems across the world.

This is a market failure that requires concerted policy intervention that puts the incubator at the centre and enables world-class incubation capability at the national scale.

It will require a combination of capability building, incentive mechanisms for corporates and science & technology institutes to work with incubators systemically, and fiscal and monetary support to enable incubators themselves to sustain and continuously innovate.