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(GIST OF YOJANA) Bridging Accessibility Gap

[May-2022]

Bridging Accessibility Gap

Introduction:

Atal Innovation Mission’s initiative, namely, Atal Community Innovation Centre (ACIC) aims to encourage the spirit of innovation through solution-driven design thinking in serving the society and has recently declared its first cohort of selected institutions through a rigorous six-stage selection process.

Atal Community Innovation Centre:

ACIC enables citizens to create cutting edge innovation by offering supportive infrastructure and opportunity areas spread across the country, with a focus on Tier 2, Tier 3 and underserved/unserved regions of Tier 1 cities, North-East, J&K, Aspirational Districts, Smart Cities, Rural and Tribal Areas; which will boost development of societal innovations and provide support to technology-driven areas especially by reducing the lab to land distance and creating a space for pre-incubation of ideas/solutions.

The primary objectives of ACIC are:

Social Innovation: Social innovations are new social practices that include the social processes of innovation with the aim of extending and strengthening society. In that regard, societal innovation refers to a systemic change in the interaction between the state and society by considering the state to be an equal partner in achieving sustainable changes to society’s structures or ways of working, and it is approved by the majority of societal stakeholders. ACIC is committed towards social innovation by:
Offering communities structured modules in design, thinking on how to apply the principles of design in problem solving, planning, and making prototypes.
Acting as a tinkering space for people irrespective of their age for working on the problems surrounding them and getting mentored from ideation stage to prototyping stage by domain experts.
Enabling every individual to ideate, deploy, and contribute in transforming the nation by tackling the problems faced by the community as a whole.
Providing necessary skillsets and toolkits to aspiring community innovators by spreading awareness about SDGs and supporting innovators in driving SDGs at the community level through innovation.
Creating an atmosphere where different communities can learn from each other and complement each other’s indigenous knowledge by removing barriers to exchange and encouraging as a result of among these improvisation interactions communities.

Empowerment:

Enabling infrastructure for providing a level playground for the naturally innovative Indian mindset and building upon it by establishing a collaborative ecosystem between different stakeholders

Ideators— People, Communities, Researchers, Civil bodies, MSMEs, intrapreneurs, etc., and
Enablers Govemments, PSUs, Financial institutions, NGOs, tech companies, Research institutions, etc.

Nurturing commercial ideas through startups by providing relevant business offerings, access to technology support, mentoring, creating networks of relevant stakeholders, scientific and information repositories, and a generally conducive and supportive environment.
Encouraging innovation for the needs of the community— Promoting and running an active programme for identification, creation, acceleration, and translation of suitable technological ideas for new venture creation and community development.
Running active training programmes in building resources, networks, competencies and special expertise in select areas at the interfaces of technology and innovation, business and entrepreneurship, government and policy.

Cooperation:

Building a pre-incubation model and feeder ecosystem at the grassroots level for Atal Incubation Centre (AICs) and Established Incubator Centres (EICs).
Collaborating with 67+ network of incubators (AICs/EICs) which nurture innovative startups in their pursuit to become scalable and sustainable.
Leveraging Mentor India’s mentoring network of 10,000+ mentors. Mentor India is a strategic nation building initiative to engage leaders who can guide and mentor students and startups across India under the programmes of AIM.
Enabling innovation by taking approach to economic development and introducing interventions designed to improve intra-cluster efficiencies.
Offering an opportunity to students from ITIs and polytechnics to display their innovative prototypes to further strengthen India’s MSME sector which is powered by a battery of technicians from ITIs/Polytechnics who rarely get opportunities for
innovation during their college and training years. These students and diploma holders are innovative and natural artisans who have identified their strengths at a very young age.

Inclusiveness:

Offering an opportunity for everyone to innovate, ideate and design impactful solutions, irrespective of their age, gender, and social hierarchy.
Creating localised support systems for supporting entrepreneurship and in turn, creating self-employment opportunities.
Creating an ecosystem to make finance accessible to people of Aspirational Districts and underserved locations of the country which have neither information
nor easy access to finance.
Providing community-oriented approach to innovation by enabling solutions through advanced tinkering.
Providing ACIC advanced tinkering space having various self-learning modules which are simple, flexible, and easy to adapt to localised needs. They will be providing a range of exposure in various fields of relevance and people will be able to design their own time table and choose curated content for learning.

Sustainability:

Educating communities on risk management in their ideation and deployment journey as well as teaching them the applications of financial management in all aspects of their daily life.
Capacity building of communities in evolving technologies and taking their solutions from ideation to prototype and profitable enterprises.
Strategically creating local, national, and global synergy with all stakeholders in the ecosystem.
Providing a framework to engage local industries to facilitate the offering of innovative solutions in their products, services, and processes.
Mobilising resources for running various programmes under ACIC umbrella in Public-Private Partnership mode to ensure financial sustainability and participation of central agencies, PSUs, etc.
Channelising CSR funds by partnering with private players to ensure long-term financial sustainability of the ecosystem. It envisions in enabling the high profit-making companies to serve the society by sharing a part of their profits on initiatives that would have social, economic, and environmental impact.
Aiming for decentralised facilitation with local industrial partners to ensure long-term gains for all stakeholders.
Providing a quantum leap towards establishing India for further scaling up the ranking in Global Innovation Index (GII) by tactically spurring improvements in all indicators of GII.

Conclusion:

By building an ecosystem for self-employability and equitable opportunity, in tandem with modem technologies, ACIC envisions India taking a leapfrog
approach to grow into world’s technology leader in the 21st century.
What sets apart India at a global scale is its diverse knowledge base of indigenous systems that can help develop fusion systems by molding traditional knowledge in modern contexts, and ensuring sustainability through adaptability.