If it were not for a day-dreamer II yr CSE student, Kartik Vij, and his mentor’s encouragement to believe in his dreams, ‘BhuGoal’ might not have born. Kartik came from a decent background and fairly good academic record. As a teenager, he always dreamt of doing something different and for every course that he learned, used to think, how it might be applied. During the orientation week for freshers, he had already learnt about CURIN and CEED. In II yr of his studies, when his mentor – an RF engineer - coming from a farmer’s family, was talking about unpredictable rains and how it affects the farmers, Kartik thought of combining his recent acquired knowledge of Machine learning and the TV signals to predict weather conditions. The result was a USD 150 device BhuGoal, which can be easily installed at households and the data from TV signals can be crowd-sourced, machine learnt to predict weather with 99% accuracy for local farmers. Later, in his third and fourth year of UG studies, he went on to win many international and national innovation and entrepreneurship awards. He has registered start-up today with the name ‘Too Decimal’. A day-dreamer got his first fight to realisation of his dreams with the help of CURIN and CEED. He is now dreaming of being a successful business tycoon and bringing out more innovative products for farmers.

In a way, above was repetition of a success story of another graduate in 2007, who, after successfully placed with a multinational came back to his alma-matter and expressed his desire to be an entrepreneur. At a time when no body, including his own family did not believe in him, the university let him establish the first university incubated start–up of the region - “TriDeal”, He was lucky that his alma matter believed in his dreams and supported him when he needed that support the most. Later TriDeal got acquired by the Paytm and successfully exited in 2012.

The ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship was envisioned to let the students “explore their potential”. It lets the students dream and believes in their capabilities. We know that innovation takes birth out of chaos and we let the chaos happen, and yet attach an eco system to give the required support to let the dreams get realised. We provide enough opportunities to them to fail, because failures let them learn more than the successes do. In our journey, we have realised that every innovative idea needs support of research and solid grounding in theoretical framework. The need arises sooner or later, and at that time, the eco system should be ready for providing support. The vision of such an eco system should excite people and let them empathise with real needs of real people.

Surprising results were showing up, when an eco system, which was designed to suit the students, also encouraged many faculty members to become entrepreneurs. Soon, the IP, Research promotion and Entrepreneurship policies were put in place to enable them to become innovators and entrepreneurs. What was just an intent, soon became the behavioural trait of the faculty and we found more and more faculty venturing into content, pedagogical and assessment innovation too. The campus now buzzes more with talks on entrepreneurial competencies than operational competencies - only for more good.

At CURIN, we aim to secure a solid foothold among the country’s top 10 universities in Entrepreneurship and Innovation by the year 2023, with our steady, growing stream of patents and start ups. To take that leap-of-faith we need more collaborators and trusted partners and so we intend to bring strategic partnerships in place from within and outside the country. We are also realigning our mission with those of UN’s SDGs. We also intend to put an impact measurement matrix in place for our innovation and entrepreneurship outcomes.