Innovation hub in the offing at JNTUH

​Hyderabad: The Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (JNTU) is all set to launch a university wide Innovation and R&D initiative called the J-Hub. Starting this academic year, the initiative is envisioned to inspire graduating engineers across colleges towards knowledge-based innovation, tech product development and entrepreneurship.

Vice-Chancellor of JNTU Prof A Venugopal Reddy said, “The initiative shall be implemented in two levels, to start with, Institutions will start local i-cells to seed innovation and create excitement around innovation. The university will then through its industry partners structure the enablement of these activities.

The i-cells will then mature into innovation/incubation units at the institution level through regular workshops on ideation, design thinking and hackathons, and innovation showcases.”

Reddy said JNTU shall provide innovation and incubation support in a pyramid structure and create a university wide framework to link to industry, tech product leaders and start-ups.

The tech prototypes from the institutions shall be provided more focussed training for about six months to graduate into start-up in the university accelerator, he added.

He further said, “This year we have about 30 colleges ready to start i-cells and more than ten to showcase innovation products. Ten products will undergo training in the accelerator starting this July”.

An Industry Advisory Council (IAC) is constituted with tech industry leaders, product initiative leaders, start-up enablers and research and innovation centres to guide the university in its R&D, Innovation strategy and directions.

During the kickoff meeting held on Thursday, the members of the council led a brainstorming session on structuring the model for innovation seeding programmes and creating culture of building tech prototypes and product based start-ups. The IAC recommended innovation hubs in colleges and a central innovation hub with R&D cell in the university campus.