Intel selects 20 teams to innovate for Digital India challenge

BANGALORE, INDIA: The Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Intel India has announced a shortlist of 20 teams participating in the Innovate for Digital India Challenge.

20 teams from across India will receive grants of INR 200,000 per team to develop prototypes in the final stage of this nation-wide contest.

The challenge aims to help bring technology to every household in India through grassroots innovation. It has tasked the participants with the creation of intuitive, easy-to-use solutions that can increase access to critical services for development in two broad areas.

The first area is innovation to create citizen's device platform with features that are relevant and drive mass adoption of technology such as, biometric sensing capabilities, peripherals using other sensors, intuitive user interface, gesture recognition, multi-lingual & voice support.

The second area is innovation to create apps that accelerate delivery of e-governance services through eKranti/MyGov apps on mobile platform.

The challenge was open to aspiring and existing entrepreneurs, innovators, academia, designers, engineers and makers and drew 1913 entries from all over the country.

Launched in April 2015, the challenge is now in the Accelerator phase where the participants will be mentored in Pune for up to 12 weeks starting in August during which they will develop MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) on Intel Architecture.

By the end of the 8-week Accelerator phase, up to ten teams will be selected and will have access to grants of Rs.500,000. The remaining ten teams will continue their mentoring phase until completion of 12 weeks.

The jury kept the two broad areas of the challenge and selected the top 20 on the basis of the idea’s ability solve a key citizen problem, delivering value to citizens, market opportunity, scalability of product/business, entry barrier/competition/uniqueness of idea and potential traction in terms of revenue, users and customers.

The challenge has been designed in collaboration with the Department of Science and Technology* (DST), with support from the Department for Electronics and Information Technology, MyGov.in and is being anchored by IIM Ahmedabad’s Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE).