Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM) grabs a gold

No news is good news. This is an idiom in the currency for more than 400 years ascribed to England’s King James I, who once wrote, “No news is better than evil news.” Hence the usual lament that it is the contemporary media that has thrived most in negativity may be off the mark.

So, as a typical journalist with cynicism as a strong suit, my first impulse was to dismiss it as a government-sponsored hype when I read the news that Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM) was chosen as the world’s best public business incubator. The Kerala media, too, rose to its reputation, also embellished by its current belligerence towards the two-year-old Pinarayi government, and largely chose to look the other way.

Yet, as I went through the entire Global World Benchmark study of business incubators and accelerators, 2021-22, done by the Stockholm-based UBI Global, an innovation intelligence company, I thought there was much to be proud of for KSUM. When the UBI released the report first in January, KSUM was ranked among the world’s top five public-private startup incubators. At that time, UBI announced that the best among these five would be announced in May.

Come May and KSUM struck gold. Rathan U Kelkar, Secretary (Electronics & IT), Government of Kerala, and Anoop Ambika, KSUM CEO, received the honour at the UBI Global ranking event held at the World Incubation Summit in Ghent, Belgium.

The other four contenders KSUM pushed behind in the top league, too, were no small fish. They are Bilgiyi Ticarilestirme Merkezi (Turkey), MIDITEC (Brazil), NEXUS (Brazil), and Shanghai Caohejing Hi-tech Park Innovation Centre (China).

Yet, the cynical hack in me was still restless. I began to probe a bit further. Obviously, the credibility of any ranking is mostly dependent on the credibility of who conducts it.

So who or what is this UBI Global? The Opposition political parties had sniped earlier that the high global praise the Pinarayi government got during Covid days was actually paid stuff. But since the praise had come from such respected media institutions like The Economist and the New York Times, the charge hardly stuck.

Yet, I did a routine check and found that it is a decade-old organisation based in Stockholm co-founded by three- Ali Amin, the CEO; Lars Henrik Friis Molin, the Chairman; and Joel Ericsson Enquist, a Board member. The company now has a network of 1200 incubator programs in 90 countries, linked to universities or run privately or publicly. Their main activities include benchmarking and impact studies, incubator and accelerator rankings, monitoring, screening and matchmaking, networking, etc. They have been doing the global ranking exercise for incubators from 2013 onwards, developed as part of the World Benchmark Study.

This year’s study focused on 109 business incubators and accelerators from 56 countries and was done with two research partners- SETsquared (UK) and DMZ at Ryerson University (Canada). The rankings included the world’s top five incubators and accelerators linked to universities and also run by private or public institutions.

The benchmarking was done based on multiple parameters like value for the ecosystem, value for client startups, and value for the programme, which also included various indices like jobs created or sustained, sales revenue, client startups accepted, total investment attracted, access to funds, etc. The top ranks for university incubators went to Istanbul Technical University (Turkey), McGill University (Canada), Universidad Técnica (Ecuador), Tecnologica de Mexico (Mexico), and the University of Toronto (Canada).

KSUM topped among the public and private incubators that “achieved outstanding impact and performance relative to their global peers.” The UBI website says these incubators outperformed their global peers with regard to the “value they provide to their innovation ecosystems and client startups, as well as the attractiveness of their programs”.

So altogether, it isn’t a small achievement. As everyone knows, Kerala’s Startup ecosystem is not as big or as high profile as those of other leading IT states like Karnataka, from where the superstars and unicorns like Flipkart, InMobi, OLA Cabs, BYJU’S or Razorpay have emerged. Yet, Kerala’s ecosystem has won national recognition even before the latest UBI ranking.

Kerala, along with Karnataka, is the only state to have emerged as a top performer consecutively in the last three (2018,19, 21) annual states’ and Union territories’ rankings by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) of the Government of India. The rankings are based on a framework spread across seven areas of intervention, including the implementation of action points along with good practices and evaluation metrics. However, Kerala is yet to break into the “Best Performer” category in these rankings, which continues to be populated by Gujarat and Karnataka and once even by Meghalaya.

In June this year, Kerala’s startup ecosystem won another global recognition when it was ranked first in Asia in Affordable Talent in Global Startup Ecosystem Report. The state was also ranked fourth in the GSER global rankings put together by the policy advisory and research organisation, Startup Genome and Global Entrepreneurship network.

In the first GSER published in 2020, Kerala was ranked fifth in Asia and 20th globally. The report praised Kerala for its ability to hire and retain rich talent with support from the government. GSER claims to be the world’s most comprehensive research on startups, with over three million startups in 280 entrepreneurial innovation systems.

So far, so good. Kerala is working on to bring its traditionally shining records in human development and palliative care to the startup scene shedding its long-term image as an “investor-unfriendly” state. It may be greener on the other side for Kerala’s middle class and the media, which may continue to ignore it. But the caravan has to go forward.

Yet, it’s not yet to rest on its oars even for a minute. Lots of miles to go and loopholes, plugged. In this New Year’s opening issue of TiKTalk, we celebrated Open Fintech’s emergence as Kerala’s first Unicorn and talked about a new revolution in the making in the state’s startup world.

We are so happy that as the year enters the midpoint, the world has taken note of the stirrings. We hope to celebrate Kerala’s second unicorn by the next New Year.

A profound moment for Indian tech sector

Groundbreaking events are currently unfolding in the Indian technology sector, as Foxconn has commenced work to establish a factory near Hyderabad, which is expected to be completed within nine months. The Taiwanese company has announced its investment of 500 million US dollars in the project, although specific details regarding the products to be manufactured there are not yet clear. However, earlier this year, Foxconn received approval to produce iPods in India. According to a report by CNBC, India and Vietnam have emerged as leading contenders to challenge China’s dominance in manufacturing and the supply chain.

Another major technology giant that could soon make its way to India is Tesla. Officials from Elon Musk's company recently visited New Delhi to hold talks with Indian officials. According to a Reuters report, Deputy Minister for Technology Rajiv Chandrasekhar stated that Tesla is “very seriously looking at India as a production and innovation base”. Until now, the electric car maker had refrained from entering the Indian market due to the high import duties imposed on electric vehicle (EV) imports.

GenZ fashion market gets a new look

Fashion world in India is also witnessing some major changes as New Delhi has given green signal to Chinese fast fashion giant Shein, two years after banning it. Wall Street Journal report says Reliance group has got the nod for a strategic partnership with the Chinese firm which raised 2 billion US dollars in funding and now is valued at 100 billion US dollars. The online race to win over GenZ and Millenial fashionistas is getting tight with UK-based Urbanic and Bangalore-based newme already in the market. According to Inc42, Nykaa Fashion may also introduce a GenZ-focussed platform soon.

Money keeps rolling in for AI firms

AI continues to be a favourite among venture capital funds, with investments in the sector increasing significantly over the past few years. In 2017, VC funds invested only 1 million US dollars in AI, but by last year, that figure had jumped to 188 million US dollars. Among the recipients of VC funding, New York-based Runway emerged as the biggest beneficiary in the past five years. Runway utilizes AI to generate images, videos, splice content together, and provide editing capabilities based on prompts. According to Insider’s report this month, Runway's valuation reached 1.5 billion US dollars after securing a funding round of "at least" 100 million US dollars. Meanwhile in South Korea, researchers have developed an AI model that trawls through the dark web to learn about how cybercriminals might be using AI.

Wood you believe it …..

Magnolia is the winner after Japanese scientists tested different types of wood that can survive in outer space. Their aim? To make future satellites with wood. They had sent out different wood to the space station, and Magnolia wood showed “no decomposition or deformations, such as cracking, warping, peeling, or surface damage”. That’s a pretty remarkable feat, considering the harsh temperatures and high levels of radiation characteristic of the final frontier, reports The Byte. The report also hopes future space stations would be made with Magnolia. Touch wood.