Anantapur: Entrepreneurial culture promotes innovations says Industrialist Virupaksha Reddy

Anantapur: Cultivating the entrepreneurial culture and providing support to start-ups indeed forms solid foundation for a progressive economy, opined M Virupaksha Reddy, an industrialist, who chaired the session on Academicia-Industry interface workshop here on Saturday.

Reddy said that entrepreneurial culture brings in enhanced scope among universities, enterprises and governments at large to foster innovative ideas and help them get converted into successful business models.

He said extensive efforts to convert the innovations into job-creating commercial products was essential and it could happen with effective collaboration between industry, academia and the government.

V Sreenath, CEO Veda Infra Development, narrated the challenges and opportunities in bringing industry and academia together in Rayalaseema and deliberated on the technologies and innovations developed by the some of the research institutions of this area.

Ganesh Iyyer from Entreesphere said that Rayalaseema has a huge potential for academic and industry collaborations as the region was sending largest number of students to IIT and IIITs.

He also said that it is important to encourage the entrepreneurs to have more investments in their R&D and engage with the institutions.

Several industrialists, who spoke on the occasion, felt that industry and academia collaborations were very important in global innovation rankings and creation of innovative solutions for social benefit.

They called for a strong policy on incentivising which benefits both industry and academia should come in. "This is the right time to take industry and academia collaborations to the next level," they said.

A V Prathap Reddy of Veda Labs said there was a need to scale up the institutional researches while preparing talent for industry ready which will solve the multi-disciplinary problems.

He also mentioned that we have to be in forefront of solving tomorrow's problems and emphasised on creating working groups and organising roundtables between Industry and Academia to strengthen the collaborations and creating a Rayalaseema innovation hub.

B Nagendra Prasad, V Suresh Kumar, B Chand Basha, A Ramakrishna and several others participated.