KOCHI:
Maker Village Kochi won the ISGF (India Smart Grid Forum) award for the best incubator in recognition of its efforts to boost the country’s startup ecosystem and encourage innovation.
Prasad Balakrishnan Nair, CEO of Maker Village based in Kalamassery near here, received the ISGF ‘Smart Incubator of the Year’ award from Indian Angel Network Co-founder Padmaja Ruparel. The award was presented at the just-concluded India Smart Utility Week (ISUW) in New Delhi.
The 2016-founded Maker Village, which is India’s largest electronic hardware incubator and ESDM facility, won the honour for its performance in the Deep-Tech Incubator segment. The award, according to ISGF which is a public-private partnership initiative of the Union Ministry of Power, “is in recognition of the implementation of a comprehensive set of facilities, creation of a vibrant innovation ecosystem and a set of nationally acclaimed startup innovations anchoring emerging technologies”. The jury also took note of the “Diversity of Innovations” emerging out of Maker Village.
Nair, expressing pleasure over winning the award of international repute, said today that the ISGF honour will boost Maker Village’s sustained efforts to collaborate with top industrial houses of the country. “It will strengthen the goodwill we enjoy at the national level,” he noted, referring to the award ceremony in the national capital.
The award committee comprised former Power Secretary Uma Shankar, former Secretary to the Union Ministry of New and Renewable Energy V Subramanian and Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission ex-member B P Singh besides Ruparel. The ceremony at The Lalit Hotel was part of the five-day ISUW.
ISGF, set up in 2010, strives to accelerate the development of smart grid technologies in the country’s power sector by providing a mechanism that facilitates joined working of the academia, industry, utilities and other stakeholders so as to provide inputs to the government in decision-making.
As for ISUW, it is ISGF’s annual flagship event launched in 2015 and considered as one of the top five international events on Smart Grids and Smart Cities.
Maker Village, which functions at the Integrated Startup Complex 20 km north of this city, is a joint initiative of Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the Government of Kerala (through Kerala StartUp Mission) with IIITM-K in Thiruvananthapuram as the nodal agency. With around 80 startups developing state-of-the-art hardware deep-tech products in divergent areas, it has eight granted patents, 40 purchase orders and a bulk of the innovations leveraging cutting-edge technologies. These include machine-learning, artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality.
Maker Village, which is emerging as the largest and the best deep-tech innovation platform in the country, is implementing various innovation and entrepreneurship development programmes with Ministry of Defence, Department of Science and Technology, Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of MSME, apart from the primary of ESDM scheme with Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
