Incubation
Seer firmly believes that to teach technology, it needs to invest in developing & using the technology. Therefore, it keeps incubating new companies. It also encourages its students to come up with new ideas and realize their dreams to be an entrepreneur. It has enabled its students by providing templates for business plan for seed funding. If their business plan is approved, it provides initial funding to them to create POC (proof of Concept) and later it also helps them by connecting them with Venture Capitalists.
By the year 2020, India’s import bill for electronics will be three times more than that of oil & petroleum products. This is going to be one of the biggest economic threats for India. Therefore, India needs to encourage electronic product development & manufacturing ecosystem so that the imports can be significantly reduced.
Seer believes that if it wants to be in the business of education, it needs to be working on cutting edge technology. Therefore, it has been continuous efforts to incubate product development companies on continuous basis.
Seer has been encouraging students to take entrepreneurship and develop products for the future. It has developed a templatized approach (Link to template) to create the business proposal so that students can get the framework to start with. If their idea is approved, Seer supports them with seed funding and mentor them till they develop prototype. Seer also helps them connect with venture capitalist for further funding. Our target is to incubate 100 such ventures in five years, leading to a lot of electronics-related problems being solved.
Below are some of the reference case studies of Seer incubations
6.1 Seer Incubation Center
By Sandeep Chanda, Founder, Slashroot Innovation
Seer Akademi has been an excellent and inspiring incubation center. Seer not only provided the resources to build a startup but the much needed day to day mentorship for a first generation entrepreneur like me. My experience with Seer has been immensely positive. Incubation centers in general require a good team along with a good idea or prototype. I for one did not have a team or prototype to begin with. All I had was the desire and passion to start something new. I met all my team members while I was working on the prototype in the Seer incubation center. Seer management provided valuable inputs and was thoroughly involved in the selection of the right candidates. I also met with number of industry experts through Seer when I was developing the first prototype. Their suggestions and insights were very helpful in shaping the product. I specifically remember a meeting an industry veteran. I gained a totally different perspective from that talk. It proved to be a critical piece of information in the product development process. Seer’s incubation model also allowed me to work part time for Seer along with working for my own startup. This provided me the much needed financial cover and helped sustain my basic needs. Sometimes this is the only reason why people don’t want to experiment or start something new. This one of a kind feature allowed me to meet my bills while pursuing my dream. Seer had also been very understanding and cooperative when our first prototype did not work out. We forged alliances and tie ups with other companies through Seer. This gave us access to experienced industry professionals and a new customer base. We tweaked our original product idea to fit the needs of a different market courtesy of the tie ups with other companies. We have continued to work in the Seer incubation center till date and are also working on a completely different idea and for a different market. This explains that Seer values the potential in an entrepreneur and not just the idea. I would recommend the Seer incubation center to a fellow entrepreneur in a heartbeat.
6.2 Seer Incubation enter
By Niranjan Rayaprolu, Team Member, Slashroot Innovation
Incubation at Seer was an amazing and inspiring experience. The management team has been very supportive and was great at taking us through the learning process. We are an innovative concept dealing with multimedia features in digital books that specializes in Indian content. Our goal is to make access of books by Indian authors and in Indian languages easily accessible.
Important qualities which I acquired during this learning process are:
- Think outside the box
- A forward thinking approach (visualizing the future , with the idea in mind)
- Planning ( Roadmap derivation for meeting the deadlines, which needs backward planning of workload)
- Desire to be an expert and deliver flawless to show the potential of the idea
Seer has been very instrumental in taking Slashroot forward (idea to execution). It has helped and guided in each and every step. Seer has helped us in developing business relations which have proven to be critical milestones in our journey so far. With my experience, I can confidently say that, Seer is the right place and the right shelter for every Entrepreneur. I sincerely thank to Seer for making this happen.
Incubation Roadmap – My Product Flow
