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The start-up venture by Raghav and Madhumitha uses the institute’s talent pool and other resources to help local industries

TechVentures, a start up launched by two students of the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka (NIT-K) to find solutions to various problems faced by small and medium enterprises by making use of the institute’s intellectual capital, has been ranked among the top student-run ventures.

A brainchild of Raghav R and Madhumitha Sridhara, TechVentures was rated amongst India’s 10 best student-run ventures by Tata and National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN).

Raghav R, a final year Metallurgical and Material Science student, told Bangalore Mirror, “TechVentures was launched in October last year. During the annual technical festival ‘Engineer’, we realised that lot of projects start and stop with the fest. We also noticed that students were recycling projects where there was no end result or objectivity. We thought it was essential that we take up a technical challenge that is socially relevant as well as industrially useful.”

“The institute has a Center for Innovation and we felt that having the Bikampady Industrial Estate close by is a great opportunity to build an industry-institute collaboration center by utilising effectively the labs and other infrastructure at NIT-K,” he said.

For Raghav, his journey to do something different began with E-Forea (Engineers Forum for Entrepreneurship Awareness), the E-Cell of NIT-K, which was awarded the best technical school promoting entrepreneurship in India. He did the groundwork with the help of Madhumitha, a third year electronics and communication student, planning how they could make the best use of the available resources like funding though the technology improvement quality programme (Teqit fund) of the Science and Technology Entrepreneurs Park (STEP). TechVentures is also inspired by innocentive.com - an open innovation market place.

Madhumitha said, “A number of small-scale industries are not able to invest large sums in importing advanced machinery needed to boost productivity and hence, depend upon manual labour which is hard to come by these days. The aim of TechVentures is to use the creativity and technical expertise of the students and faculty and other resources such as labs and innovation centres to find solutions to the difficulties faced by the industrial units. This is a low cost model and is also sustainable as it increases the relevance of the University y supporting and helping local industries and making them a key stake holder in the development of the local economy.”

As a pilot project to tackle the problem of over dependence on manual labour for Swastika Coco Products, they initiated a competition for the best design for a deshelling machine and followed it up with prototype development. The team comprising Tariq and Prajwal MP, both second year mechanical students, and Raghav were involved in making the machine.

Raghav said, “With the resources available at NIT-K, which is often not used during summer vacations, we hope to conduct training courses in welding, fitting, inventory management, operations, accountancy, financial management, tally, etc.”

For Madhumitha and Raghav, the best moment so far has been an acknowledgement received from Prof Anil K Gupta of IIM Ahmadabad, known for grassroots innovation and development. While Madumitha heads projects and consulting at E-Forea at present, Raghav dreams of setting up a virtual incubator in every IIM.