23rd April 2024: The Department of Management and Entrepreneurship Development Cell organised a visit to AIC RNTU on 23rd April 2024. Students of the BBA IV Semester were accompanied by Mr Arun Panicker who is in charge of the Entrepreneurship Development Cell. In the academic curriculum of BBA fourth semester a subject New Venture Plan, which consists of a visit to a startup facilitation centre and the visit was organised to fulfil the objective.
Students were welcomed to the AIC RNTU by the CEO Mr. Ronald Fernandez and his team. Mr Fernandez introduced himself and his team to the visiting students. A short presentation was shown to orient students on how AIC-RNTU was established at Rabindra Nath Tagore University with the support of NITI Aayog. Ms Kirti Jain, Manager at AIC RNTU initiated her discussion on Start-up by differentiating between a startup and a business. After this, she discussed the AIC scheme of the NITI Aayog of the Government of India. She detailed the assistance offered to startups under the scheme, the eligibility criteria and how a startup can take advantage of it. The assistance of AIC-RNTU is limited to start-ups recognised by Start-up India and has DPIIT registrations, along with generating revenues in their early stage. In exchange for funding and assistance through mentoring and networking, they claim a small amount of equity in the business. The equity can be claimed back by the startup in exchange for the value when they want to leave the umbrella of the Incubation Centre after scaling up.
The visiting group of students had some start-up ideas but not in operations or any initiative, the team of AIC-RNTU detailed the hackathons that they organise from time to time for those with start-up ideas. There was also discussion on how the Government of India apart from AIC is supporting startups and innovations through different schemes.
After the session, they introduced different facilities of their Incubation Centre which were co-working space, meeting rooms, fabrication and engineering lab which had modern equipment like a 3d printer, CNC machine and much more. All these facilities can be used by startups and innovators, in exchange for a small amount of rent. With this, the visiting session ended with visiting students learning about the startups and the support provided by AIC and the Government of India.