Harvard SAI Ties Up With IIT Delhi to Help Startups; Tata Trusts to Give Grant

Friday, February 19, 2016

Harvard University’s South Asia Institute has joined hands with the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and Tata Trusts in a first initiative of its kind to mentor 25 social entrepreneurship startups in science and technology. The project, led by the institute director Tarun Khanna, aims to create jobs by helping these startups with mentoring, workshops and providing grants to select ventures.

The institute, a research and idea generation centre at Harvard University, requested and received a grant from Tata Trusts to experiment with ways to translate knowledge that was generated in the university setting into livelihood creation.

“India needs 100 million net new jobs in the next decade to absorb the demographic dividend,” said Khanna. “I don’t know of any system in the world that has generated that many jobs in a short period of time without a significant dose of new enterprise creation and entrepreneurship,” said Khanna, who chaired the Government of India Niti Aayog Commission on Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

Emphasising the relevance of this collaboration, R Venkataramanan, executive trustee at Tata Trusts said: “Under this collaboration with Harvard University’s South Asia Institute, we will develop entrepreneurship opportunities that will help provide sustainable prosperity to the local communities.

Source: The Economic Times (link opens in a new window)

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