The Ministry of MSME in association with the National Innovation Council under the Chairmanship of Sam Pitroda, Adviser to the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Public Information, Infrastructure and Innovations (PIII) is likely to work out a corpus of Rs.100 crore to promote innovation in the MSME sector for the next financial year.

“There is a National Innovation Council under Sam Pitroda where MSME as a ministry will be working very closely with them. And, in the next financial year we hope to work out Rs.100 crore program with them, which is fully  targeting the act of innovation at the bottom of the pyramid to route clusters,” said MSME Secretary, R. K. Mathur in New Delhi during a FICCI MSME Summit on “Innovation and Clusters” on Thursday.

On the sidelines of the summit, he also added, “The modalities are being worked out on what would be the structure of the project. But the theme would be the inclusive innovation.”

He said that whatever innovation has been found or thought by the innovators should be commercialized.

Further, Mathur also mentioned that the corpus will eventually be increased to Rs.500 crore and then again leverage to Rs. 2000 crore over a period of time.

“About Rs.2500 crore corpus we are thinking about at the moment,” he added.

Dwelling his views in the summit, Dr. Ashwani Kumar, Minister of State for Science & Technology, Planning and Earth Sciences also said the Department of Science & Technology has proposed the concept of ‘Technology Business Incubators (TBI)’ to provide specialized guidance, critical support services, innovative financing, networking support and conducive environment to the start-up companies.

“This concept is practised by funding the incubator centers set up in the various academic and research institutions such as IITs which provide the initial push as innovators for pursuing the idea and taking to the level of commercialization,” Kumar added.

In keeping with the agenda of the 12th Five Year Plan which aims at faster, more inclusive and sustainable growth, it is vital to strengthen the Indian innovation eco-system to benefit people across the spectrum and improve their quality of life, he said.

The relevance of this eco-system to our future has to be ensured by leveraging international cooperation in the service of our innovation strategies, Kumar added.