Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) for UPSC
Atal Innovation Mission (AIM): Overview
Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) is the Government of India’s flagship initiative to promote a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship in the country. AIM’s objective is to develop new programmes and policies for fostering innovation in different sectors of the economy, provide platform and collaboration opportunities for different stakeholders, create awareness and create an umbrella structure to oversee innovation ecosystem of the country.
Atal Innovation Mission (AIM): Supervision
Atal Innovation Mission initiative is set up by the NITI Aayog to promote innovation and entrepreneurship across the length and breadth of the country, based on a detailed study and deliberations on innovation and entrepreneurial needs of India in the years ahead.
Atal Innovation Mission (AIM): Objectives
AIM is also envisaged as an umbrella innovation organization that would play an instrumental role in alignment of innovation policies between central, state and sectoral innovation schemes incentivizing the establishment and promotion of an ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship at various levels – higher secondary schools, science, engineering and higher academic institutions, and SME/MSME industry, corporate and NGO levels.
Long term goals of AIM include establishment and promotion of Small Business Innovation Research and Development at a national scale (AIM SBIR) for the SME/MSME/startups, and in rejuvenating Science and Technology innovations in major research institutions of the country like CSIR (Council of Scientific Industrial Research), Agri Research (ICAR) and Medical Research (ICMR) aligned to national socio-economic needs.
Six major initiatives of AIM:
- Atal Tinkering Labs-Creating problem-solving mindset across schools in India.
- Atal Incubation Centers-Fostering world class start-ups and adding a new dimension to the incubator model.
- Atal New India Challenges-Fostering product innovations and aligning them to the needs of various sectors/ministries.
- Mentor India Campaign- A national Mentor network in collaboration with public sector, corporates and institutions, to support all the initiatives of the mission.
- Atal Community Innovation Center- To stimulate community centric innovation and ideas in the unserved /underserved regions of the country including Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.
- ARISE-To stimulate innovation and research in the MSME industry.
The Atal Innovation Mission (AIM): Details
Atal Tinkering Labs – to promote creative, innovative mind set in schools
These ATLs are dedicated innovation workspaces of 1200-1500 square feet where do-it-yourself (DIY) kits on latest technologies like 3D Printers, Robotics, Internet of Things (IOT), Miniaturized electronics are installed using a grant of Rs 20 Lakhs from the government so that students from Grade VI to Grade XII can tinker with these technologies and learn to create innovative solutions using these technologies. The vision of Atal Tinkering Lab initiative is to ‘Cultivate 1 Million children in India as Neoteric Innovators’. The objective of this scheme is to foster curiosity, creativity and imagination in young minds and inculcate skills such as design mind-set, computational thinking, adaptive learning, physical computing, rapid calculations, measurements etc.
Atal Incubators – to promote entrepreneurship in universities and industry
At the university, NGO, SME and Corporate industry levels, AIM is setting up world-class Atal Incubators (AICs) that would trigger and enable successful growth of sustainable startups in every sector /state of the country. Women led incubators and entrepreneurial startups are strongly encouraged by AIM. AIM is also providing scale up support to existing incubators for scaling up their operations. AIM is providing a grant of upto Rs 10 crores to successful applicants for setting up greenfield incubators or scaling up existing ones. The idea is that every one of the 110 named smart cities and the top 5-10 educational / industrial institutions of every state should aspire to have a world class incubator that will provide the youth / startup communities in the universities / industries opportunity to create new start ups.
Atal New India Challenges and Atal Grand Challenges – to promote specific product innovations with social / economic impact
AIM will be launching Atal New India Challenges / Atal Grand Challenges in specific areas and sectors of national importance, most of which are also aligned with the priorities recommended by the Economic Survey 2017-18. The initiative lays its focus on solving such problems in the core areas, which would directly impact the quality of life of the citizens and also generate employment. The applicant displaying the capability and intent to manufacture marketable products under the 17 pre-identified focus areas will be granted an award grant up to 1 crore rupees. The winning grantees would be provided support in terms of technical support, go-to-market strategies by leading experts, accelerators and incubators, technical support, mentoring and others. In order to generate wider deployment, mentoring and support would be provided at various levels of commercialisation.The challenge is open to all the Start-ups, companies registered under the Companies Act 1956 and the Companies Act 2013, R&D institutions, academicians, academic institutions and individual innovators.
Mentors of Change – to mentor students at ATL and AIC Incubators / Startups
AIM has set up one of the largest Mentoring networks in India called Mentor India from the professional and industry community who can mentor students at ATL and AIC Incubators / startups. Over 5000+ mentors have already registered and every operational ATL has already been allocated a mentor. A number of industry leaders and corporate organizations have volunteered to adopt ATLs/AICs in their vicinities to ensure close mentoring and success of these initiatives. AIM is also actively working on establishing collaborations with innovation systems and entities in other countries in APAC, Europe, UK, USA, Africa and Latin American Countries.
Atal Innovation Mission AIM-iCREST
Atal Innovation Mission launched ‘AIM-iCREST’, in partnership with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Wadhwani Foundation.
- AIM iCREST – an Incubator Capabilities enhancement program for a Robust Ecosystem focuses on creating high performing Startups
- AIM iCREST has been designed to enable the incubation ecosystem and act as a growth hack for AIM’s Atal and Established incubators across the country.
- Under the initiative, the AIM’s incubators are set to be upscaled and provided requisite support to foster the incubation enterprise economy, that will help them to significantly enhance their performance.
- This will be complemented by providing training to entrepreneurs, through technology driven processes and platforms.
Read more about AIM and Niti Ayog here: https://niti.gov.in/aim
Visit the website of AIM here : https://www.aim.gov.in/
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