The Centre of Excellence for IoT (CoE-IoT) was announced by the Prime Minister of India in July 2015 as a part of Digital India initiative to jump start the IoT ecosystem in India. The plan is to take advantage of India’s IT strengths to help the country attain a leadership role in the convergent area of hardware and software.  

The main objective of the CoE-IoT is to create innovative applications and domain capability. It is expected to help in building industry capable talent, start-up community and an entrepreneurial ecosystem for IoT. As visionaries in the IoT space in India ourselves, we are closely monitoring this program to leverage from the benefits provided and contribute if and when possible.

Start-Up Program

The CoE is building programs for entrepreneurs / start-ups to collocate, incubate, prototype the creation and validation of IoT products in the areas of wearables, fitness and healthcare, industrial automation, home automation and security, life safety communication protocol, cyber security, automotive etc. The CoE promises to provide the following support to the startups / entrepreneurs.

• Funding – The CoE provides angel funding and acceleration, but also accepts requests by relatively mature companies looking to raise funds.
• Acceleration – The CoE has one the best accelerator programs in India.
• Mentoring – It provides focused group workshops for shortlisted companies on product management, go-to-market strategy, pitching and industry insights from experts.
• Enterprise Connects – If an idea is selected for the program, the presenting company has the opportunity to showcase their final products to top executives of India across industries to explore the possibilities of strategic partnerships, alliances, M&As or just business.

Incubation program

The incubation program of CoE can help in incubating, nurturing and accelerating the best technology ideas. These ideas get access to physical infrastructure in the IoT lab such as tools and fixtures, capital equipment, collocation space and also funding partners, enterprise connections and mentoring support.

The IoT lab under CoE is an interoperable, multi-technology based stack that can provide prototype design equipment, validation and testing space, demo space and concept labs. They are equipped with all the latest technological requirements that startups / entrepreneurs need to direct their work towards success.

Academia program

The academia program has the following features:

• Curriculum development
• Industry access
• College incubation
• Leveraging the infrastructure
• Internship programs
• Faculty development program

This program is focused on college and student research where they can leverage the infrastructure present and access industry projects for the development and validation in their institution.

Enterprise program

Enterprises under CoE programs are connected to virtual corporate accelerator and an external innovation lab. They can take help from CoE-IoT and make use of their resources for testing and validating their own solutions under multiple protocols and on concept labs for solutions pertaining to specific environments such as smart city, smart agriculture etc. They can also engage with startups in other programs.

The Internet of Things is the most disruptive technology of this century. It presents great opportunities for businesses. The global opportunity is likely to touch 300 billion USD in five years. It needs fostering with utmost growth and we’re glad that a program to do just that exists in India.

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