Qualcomm announces Design in India initiative

NEW DELHI, INDIA: In a bid to support the GOI initiative of Make in India, Qualcomm had announced a Design in India initiative.

It must be noted that Paul E Jacobs, Executive Chairman, Qualcomm, had announced Qualcomm’s support for the Government of India’s Digital India and Make in India vision and committed to introduce a Design in India Initiative to encourage the creation of a local product design ecosystem, when he met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Digital Economy event held in September, 2015 in San Jose.

Secondly, Qualcomm has partnered with NaSSCOM for the Qualcomm Design in India Challenge, to encourage local product development and create hardware design ecosystem in the areas of smart phones, tablets, and Internet of Things (IoT) products for healthcare, education, banking, agriculture, automotive, wearables and smart cities.

As part of the Qualcomm Design in India Challenge, Qualcomm will also set up an Innovation Lab in Bangalore, through an Indian subsidiary, to provide technical and engineering support to the Indian companies in their endeavor to develop innovative ideas into products and hardware designs.

Some key highlights of the Qualcomm Design in India Challenge include:

•    Registration and application starts today and ends on February 29, 2016.

•    The Challenge is open to all India-based individual companies or start-ups with a minimum of one year of operation which can demonstrate hardware designs for smart phones, tablets, wearables and products for smart cities, automotive & telematics, robotics and devices for the IoT ecosystem.

•    Up to 10 shortlisted companies will be eligible for funding of $10,000 each to proceed to the prototyping phase and will be incubated at our state-of-the-art Qualcomm Innovation Lab for nearly six months.

•    Upto three companies with the most promising products will be selected by an eminent judging panel as winners and each will receive up to $100,000 as recognition and encouragement for future efforts.

JS Deepak, Secretary, Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India, said, “We look forward to seeing the Qualcomm Design in India Initiative propel more opportunities for innovation, design and development in India, which will energize the domestic hardware manufacturing ecosystem to address both domestic and global market needs.”

Sunil Lalvani, Vice President and President of Qualcomm India & South Asia, said, “The Qualcomm Design in India Challenge has been conceived to leverage India’s vast pool of skilled engineering talent and to galvanize multitudes of indigenous hardware design companies to innovate technological breakthroughs that we hope will help bridge industrial, infrastructural and societal gaps in India.”

R Chandrasekhar, President, NASSCOM, said, “This initiative is closely aligned with NASSCOM’s own vision to 'Connect, Collaborate and Co-create', which advocates the empowerment of the Indian economy through large scale technology adoption across horizontals such as healthcare, education, agriculture and others.”