Knowledge based and innovation oriented society provides required impetus for faster economic growth. Hence, it is very pertinent to usher in an enabling Eco-system for encouraging and sustaining the Innovations with an aim to make it an instrument of societal progress. Translating technologies and research into product development and revenue generating source is highly time consuming for startup ventures.
With an aim to contribute to this effort, we started to learn mushroom cultivation at Faculty of Life Sciences, JSS Academy of Higher Education & Research, Mysuru during our 3rd year B.Sc., Biotechnology. As a beginning, a few of my classmates along with me were motivated to learn mushroom cultivation through a pre-incubation centre at Faculty of Life Sciences. Motivations and support of Dr. T.S. Gopenath, Associate Professor of Biotechnology was a main driving factor which
gave us thought to come up with novel ideas into prototypes and further lead to successful commercial products of local relevance which can have great impact on the population of this region, in particular.
Towards the end of our Bachelor degree we had already set up our own mushroom cultivation facility outside the campus with our own funding. With a partnership of 4 members we started to cultivate two types of mushrooms, viz., Oyster and Milky white. After initial struggles to find market to our products, now we have reached a stable position in the business and we hope to strengthen it through various by-products.