NEW DELHI:
South Asia’s biggest telecom, Internet, and technology event India Mobile Congress 2019 held the Grand Innovation Challenge to foster innovation, entrepreneurship and skill development by encouraging startups and new entrepreneurs in the telecom sector, in line with the Government’s flagship ‘Start up India’ and ‘Make in India’ initiatives.
The initiative attempts to identify unique solutions and encourage development of innovative products and solutions that can improve connectivity, enhance user experience and facilitate India’s digital transformation and empowerment. The platform is not only relevant for early stage startups, but is also important for scaling stage startups, individuals and accelerators.
Winners of the Grand Innovation Challenge Awards are Sensegiz Tech Pvt ltd and SNAS IoT Labs for Densification of IoT; nebuLARC Tech Pvt ltd won the Enterprise Digital Transformation award; BKC Aggregators won in the Agriculture Technology category, Matisoft Cyber security Ltd won the Cyber security and Privacy award category; Go Sharp Tech and consulting Pvt ltd, Vawsum and Learning Matters won the Interactive Digital Education award category; JuV Technologies Pvt ltd and Notifyvisitors.com won the Customer Experience category.
The innovators were felicitated by Anshu Prakash, Secretary, Department of Telecommunications (DoT). Also present on the occasion was Rajan Mathews, Director General, COAI.
Any individual, institution, Lab, Company or Startup in India developing any innovative product or service were eligible to take part in the innovation challenge. However, the only pre-requisite was that the innovation submitted should be at least at the prototype stage or one that is feasible or viable for actual on-ground deployment.
The IMC Grand Innovation Challenge Awards 2019 were organised in association with AGNIi and Invest India, supported by NALCO ETBI, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea Ltd. and Reliance Jio Infocomm.
Speaking at the Grand Innovation Challenge Awards at IMC 2019, Rajan S Mathews, Director General, COAI stated, “We are pleased to announce the winners of the Grand Innovation Challenge Awards, 2019. India is a young country with a lot of potential and promises. This explains how we are the second largest startup ecosystem in the world today. Through this awards program, we looked to identify viable solutions that will support the densification of IoT, solutions around network modernization, managed services, customer experience and security & compliance, modern agricultural technology, data privacy and cybersecurity, innovative solutions that would directly impact revenue streams of enterprises, give rise to different business models and enhance overall experience. Special emphasis was put on technology-driven learning apps and other transformative digital tools that will make education more interactive and immersive than what it is today. Over 110 companies participated in this challenge.
There are several incentives that the winning startups will be eligible to avail of. These include fiscal incentive of upto to INR 20 lakh (as investment fund) for selected start-ups, induction ‘Emerging Technology Business Incubator’ at NALCO CoETE for selected start-ups, access to test beds and technologies available to Airtel, Jio and Vodafone India Pvt Ltd. Selected startups will also win a chance to visit and work in the Ericsson innovation lab in Europe.
Themed “Imagine a new connected world: Intelligent, Immersive and Inventive”, IMC 2019 has played host to wide array of panel discussions, conferences, exhibitions and networking events.
