Dipti Gore
This winter, Startup Tunnel (STun) is launching India’s very first CivicTech Incubation Program. STun is looking for ambitious entrepreneurs with a passion to solve the real and tough challenges burdening Indian cities today. Whether by publishing data to influence decisions, improving public services through digital platforms, empowering citizen action, or disrupting existing ways of city living, applicants are encouraged to build solutions specific to a sector, or cutting across multiple sectors, be it healthcare, education, governance, energy, pollution or water. This program isn’t looking for the ‘just-another’ or copy-cat ideas. It is looking to discover the next moonshot, that will drastically improve the lives of millions.
STun’s offering to entrepreneurs focuses on two critical aspects of an early stage enterprise – the Product and the Pitch. Drawing on more than a decade’s work in user-centered innovation, STun provides incubatees with the support necessary to design and develop a product with a user-centered approach. This covers aspects of needs analysis, feature-set definition, functionalities, interface design and branding. Incubatees will have access to STun’s wide network of mentors, advisors and investors. They will also have access to large investor events, like GSF, social innovation conclaves like Design Public and startup pitching events like Pecha Kucha Nights and Product Meet. Incubatees will have the chance to pitch to government in the first week of November, during the Citizen Participation in Urban Innovation event, and once again in December to a group of investors at Slingshots.
The full-time program, will run through a three month period this winter, will run out of the Vihara Innovation Campus, in Chattarpur where incubatees will have access to a working space, an auditorium, a cafeteria, Wi-Fi, a maker space and demo deck. The highlight of the program is that it is a No Fees No Equity model, which means that the services that STun provides are for free.
STun is a Delhi based early-stage incubator. After launching in January 2015, the Startup Tunnel has incubated five early stage start-ups, Mera Garden, JobSpire, TrueLancer, Amicus and Butterfly Innovations. Working in the spaces of e-commerce, recruitment and education, some of them are now running revenue positive ventures, while others have successfully secured seed funding. STun is now partnering with CivicLabs, a division of CKS Consulting, bringing innovation techniques to the public sector and governments towards the creation of new digital public services, to put together a one of a kind CivicTech Incubation Program. Two of the greatest startup heros of our time, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, have worked closely with government, to build Palantir and Space X respectively. The CivicTech incubator program, doesn’t believe otherwise, and intends to be space to make it happen.