Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu together launched a bilateral innovation challenge for startups in Israel and India: India-Israel Innovation Bridge. This was during PM Modi’s visit to Israel.
According to Inc42, the Israel Innovation Authority, Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP), Ministry of Commerce and Industry have joined hands for the challenge.
The challenge will be an online platform to facilitate bilateral collaboration between Israeli and Indian startups, tech hubs, corporations, and other key innovation ecosystem players in both countries. There will be comprehensive guides and toolkits to help startups explore expansion opportunities, according to an official statement.
Hyderabad-based incubator T-Hub, Ahmedabad-based incubator iCreate and pears program have made an initial commitment to the startups that will be chose at the innovation challenge.
The India-Israel Innovation Bridge has invited startups to develop solutions for some of the world’s most critical challenges in the areas of healthcare, agriculture and water technology.
According to the Startup India website, under healthcare, startups should develop solutions for real-time health monitoring, home care, remote care, periodic counseling and advice on health management for non-communicable diseases. These should be innovative, inclusive, low cost diagnostics and predictive solutions in rural areas.
Under Agriculture, solutions to reduce post-harvest loss and improve market linkages. These should be affordable easy-to-use solutions to enhance agricultural productivity and increase farmers’ earnings.
And for water, the challenge invites startups to develop low-energy and cost-effective sustainable solutions for wastewater treatment, desalination, recycling or purifying large water sources and surface water. These should be innovative and affordable solutions that produce potable drinking water at point of use in both rural and urban areas.
Proposals that make it will win cross-border mentorship and incubation/acceleration prizes. They will get an opportunity to participate in an exclusive co-creation summit in India with industry leaders, experts and potential partners, gain a bilateral market access seminar in Israel, an opportunity to pilot with leading partners in India.
The challenge says that technologies must have at least initial validation but must not yet be commercialized in India.
The participating startups will be selected by a joint panel of judges to give an opportunity to further develop their solutions through a unique programme managed by Invest India and Israel Innovation Authority.
Applications for the challenge will open on September 10, 2017.
This article has been produced with inputs from T-Hub as a part of a partner program.