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NITI Aayog and SAP Renew SOI to Cultivate the Indian Startup Ecosystem

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NITI Aayog’s Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) and SAP Labs India announce the renewal of their Statement of Intent (SOI)—initially signed in 2018. The five-year private-public partnership aims to foster the Indian startup ecosystem through the advancement of digital literacy. It also endeavors to further cultivate an entrepreneurship and innovation culture in the country by providing mentoring support to youth-led startups.

Ramanan Ramanathan, Mission Director of the AIM and Additional Secretary at NITI Aayog comments:

“The collaboration between AIM and SAP Labs India is of great value addition for the ATLs and the youth-led startups with the AICs. The students, teachers, and startups will hugely benefit from this partnership.”

Sindhu Gangadharan, SVP and Managing Director at SAP Labs India also said:

“We are pleased to strengthen our partnership with Atal Tinkering Laboratories (ATL). Promoting Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), education, and digital skills among school children will enable inclusive and equitable growth in the society.”

Gangadharan adds:

“With the adoption of 100 ATL’s in the next three years, SAP will equip young talent with advanced digital skills, experiential STEM education, and expertise to drive socio-economically relevant innovation at a young age. We aim to strengthen and catalyze the incubator and startup ecosystem significantly.”

NITI Aayog—Promoting a Culture of Innovation with SAP

Under the NITI Aayog and SAP partnership, employee volunteers from SAP coach and mentor students through Atal Tinkering Laboratories. Atal Tinkering Laboraties is a program of India’s Central Government that aims to develop students’ modern digital skills through hands-on teaching methods. According to SAP, its goal is to educate 30,000 students from different states, including Northeast, Uttar Pradesh, and Karnataka by adopting 100 Atal Tinkering Laboratories.

Following the SOI renewal, SAP employee volunteers will additionally guide and train around 500 teachers under AIM’s Unbox Tinkering Workshop, “Training of Trainers” (ToT) program—which will run in the next three years.

The partnership also renders mentoring support to startups through incubation centers. Currently, there are 68 Atal Incubation Centers (AICs) across India. Together with AIM, SAP will be developing a new platform for these AICs to help participating incubators expand their network connections. 

About NITI Aayog

The National Institution for Transforming India, also called NITI Aayog, was formed via a resolution of the Union Cabinet on January 1, 2015. NITI Aayog is the premier policy ‘Think Tank’ of the Government of India, providing both directional and policy inputs. 

NITI Aayog designs strategic and long term policies and programs for the Government of India. It also provides relevant technical advice to the Centre and States.

About AIM

Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) is the Government of India’s flagship initiative to create and promote a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship across the country. AIM’s objective is to develop new programs and policies for fostering innovation in different sectors of the economy, provide platforms and collaboration opportunities for different stakeholders, and create an umbrella structure to oversee the innovation & entrepreneurship ecosystem of the country. AIM’s initiatives have played an important contributory role in the advancement of India from a position of 81 in the Global Innovation Index in 2015 to a position of 48 in 2020.

AIM has adopted a holistic approach encompassing schools, universities, research institutions, industry, MSME, NGOs, Ministries, at district, state, and national levels.

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