Stages of Incubation

Interest Generation Campaigns: At this stage through various physical and virtual activities, prospect incubatees will be reached out and encouraged to pursue entrepreneurship in the ESDM sector.  They will be exposed to the concept of Electropreneur Park.

Proposal Submission: Through a series of activities including ‘Business Proposal Competition’ etc. prospect incubatees will be asked to crystallize their ideas and submit them in the shape of a formal proposal.  The Electropreneur Park management will either prescribe a format or to encourage creativity, lay down only the basic guidelines to be adhered.  This is to ensure that no critical information is missed out and also ease the evaluation process.

Evaluation: At this stage, the proposal completeness will be checked in all respects.  All proposals that have all the requisite information will be cleared for next stage, while the incomplete ones will be sent back and kept in waiting list to keep the back-up ready in case of fail-overs, etc.

Scrutiny of Proposals: The office of Electropreneur Park will properly scrutinize all the correctly submitted proposals for their technical as well as commercial feasibility.  This scrutiny will be done at the conceptual level whereby the experts’ committee will check for the preliminary conceptual feasibility.  Here it is important to note that the proposals should qualify for technical as well as commercial aspects.

Interview: It is important to evaluate the person behind a proposal as well.  The selection committee as may be appointed by the Electropreneur Park management will interview the short listed candidates.  The thrust of the interview would be to check how enterprising the candidate is and what is the level of clarity about going on this project.

Selection: Based on the final scores earned out of the quality of proposal and the interview appeared, the top ten (10) would be selected and enrolled for incubation.  They will be asked to go for all the processes that may be laid as part of the enrolment process.  At this stage the incubatee is now enrolled at the Electropreneur Park.

Induction: Even though the incubatees will be having some idea about the incubation and the Electropreneur Park, an induction capsule will be run whereby the incubatees will be given all the information about how incubation works and the processes and services in place at the Electropreneur Park.  This programme will also focus on conveying to the incubatees about the expectations with respect to outcomes that Electropreneur Park aspires.

Mentorship: This is where each incubatee and the Product ideation will be anchored.  Here an industry champion will be assigned to each of the incubatee for providing ‘round the clock’ guidance about various aspects spanning from technical issues to challenges met throughout the incubation.

Proposal Refinement: Here the incubatee will discuss the proposal with his/her mentor who in turn will fine tune the proposal enriching it through his/her experience and making the concept more attractive for product development and ultimately for attracting finances.

Proof of Concept: Once the proposal is finalised, the incubatee will work on developing the Proof of Concept.  The purpose of submitting PoC is to reinforce the possibility of visualising the product so that the incubation reaches its logical conclusion.  This will also act as an intermediary goal to actualise and realise the ultimate objective.

PoC Evaluation: This stage will check upon the Proof of Concept developed.  Here the mentor will go in detail about every element of PoC and suggest any changes or modifications.  To have wider perspectives, the mentor may opt for a peer review to pick up multiple brains.

Product / IP Development: This step will be towards more of actualisation.  Whatever had been conceived and proved through a concept, will now be developed as a final product.  This stage will be more towards ‘tangiblisation’ of the concept that will form the basis of the future business entity.

Evaluation of Product / IP: At this stage, the product or IP developed throughout will go for an evaluation.  The first round of evaluation would be done by the mentor and later it would go for another round of evaluation by a peer review committee that would be appointed by the Electropreneur Park management.  The idea will be more of constructive criticism rather than negative feedback, to allow the incubatees further refine the Product / IP.

Market Development: Once the Product is in final shape, Electropreneur Park through its associates will now focus on developing a venture out of it.  Through a series of activities like holding exhibitions, using online medium to create awareness about the product and showcasing the product in various print and technology journals, efforts will be made to ‘expose’ the product to the stakeholders.  The main focus of these activities would be to attract attention of potential investors, product companies, etc.

Funding and Exit: The product has been developed and exposed to the market; it now requires the next boost to start production so that it goes beyond the labs and ceases to be an idea being incubated.  It’s now turn to convert this into a business opportunity.  The product unique technical propositions (UTPs) and the unique selling propositions (USPs) will be shared with the potential investor community including, but not limited to, venture capitalists, investment banks, companies, etc.  Once, it gets funded, the process of exit will start that completes the process of incubation and now the Product can stand an organisation or enterprise.