Publication Name: Zillion Business Review
Date: August, 2013
A part of the $100-billion Tata group, Tata Elxsi is a global design company that blends technology, creativity and engineering to help customers transform ideas into world-class products and solutions. The company recently launched the incub@TE programme, an incubation centre programme to nurture and support aspiring entrepreneurs in India. Rajesh Kumar, who looks after the Strategic Initiatives at Tata Elxsi as well as heads the incub@TE programme, explains what they aim to achieve with this initiative.
Tata Elxsi employs a talent pool of over 4000 employees across a network of design studios, development centres and offices worldwide. Key services include embedded product design, industrial design, animation and visual effects, and systems integration.
The company is headquartered in Bengaluru, India, and its operations are supported by offices in the US, Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. It has a state of- the-art facility in Mumbai for visual effects and a near-shore centre in Japan.
Mr. Kumar joined Tata Elxsi in 1997, and has since then set up and expanded the services business in various areas including product research and design engineering for audio video products, digital TV, Image processing and Computer graphics.
He now spearheads incub@TE, Tata Elxsi’s recently launched initiative geared at creating the next wave of product and service oriented technology start-ups in the areas of internet, mobile, social, local, enterprise, cloud and embedded applications. “Our ambition with this is to facilitate the development of new products and solutions by leveraging emerging technologies, and to offer our support in converting them into a commercial success,” states Mr. Kumar.
He adds that in the framework of the incub@TE programme, Tata Elxsi plans to take a minority stake in around twenty Indian startups over the next couple of years. The first startup it has signed on is Big V Telecom, which offers customised business telephony solutions for businesses and consumers.
Big V has already deployed its solutions in select regions in India, and is looking to scale its presence across India. The company is also fairly established in other ways: it has won several business awards and its founder and manager, Keshor Daga, is a well recognised, multiple award winning entrepreneur.
Mr. Kumar emphasises, however, that Big V is not a typical incub@TE project in that respect. “Nurturing talent and innovation has always been part of Tata Elxsi’s DNA. Through incub@TE we primarily aim to sign on aspiring, young entrepreneurs to help them realise their full potential, by providing infrastructure, expertise and support in access to key markets and funding.
India does not have a fully-fledged startup culture yet, but we believe that the incub@TE programme can help create such a culture, helping talented people with good ideas to strengthen their technology and solutions roadmap.”