A Report on Training Program on Startup Ignition Entrepreneurship Opportunities in Millets Nutri Hub (Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) & Indian Institute of Millets Research (IIMR)

IIMR conducting a training program on Startup Ignition Entrepreneurship Opportunities in millets through Nutri Hub, Nutri Hub promotes Innovations and Entrepreneurship in the areas of Millets and nutricereals sectors which is a unique and first of its kind of its kind to cater startup needs in the country, it aims to help entrepreneurs to ideate, incubate and accelerate their innovative early-stage startups into successful by providing value added product technologies in millets, infrastructural support, mentoring, networking and business advisory and incubating for new entrepreneurs. On this meeting MITHRA Foundation President & General Sectary and different category persons are attend that training program, they are paying fee for that training, it was very useful to the farmers to add a value additions to their production by this they get more profit and no wastage on production.

Nesting incubation and Entrepreneurship for leveraging agri-innovations in nutricereals branded as Nutrihub, it is a technology business incubator is established under the initiative of Center for Excellence (CoE) on value addition in millets and ICAR Hyderabad, it has been supported by Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Govt. of India, The incubator brings farmers, entrepreneurs, mentors, investors, key business enablers, Agri- academicians and Agri- scientists together to create a vibrant startup eco-system.

On this meeting was initiated main head of the Nutrihub department and their staff explained about what are the objectives, vision and mission of incubation technology, value addition to the millets, why we use value addition to the millets etc., are taken place on morning session of the training program and afternoon session starts with in IIMR center how many value added products are making through the millets, what kind of technology they using for finial output, on that place we are visiting cleaning process of millets to final value addition products and their machinery , cost of that machinery and where that was available, time process of output, ingredients of the final products, there we can noticed with one type of millet they prepared 36 product lines like millet flour line, rava line, biskets, cakes, puffs, pasta, sweets, murukulu, other snacks items etc., 

The main objectives of Nutrihub is to handhold, mentor and promote startups in nutria cereals by creating value added products, services and employment, promoting new technologies, share their knowledge and innovations to the new startups, to facilitate technology commercialization undertake last mile scale up from pilot level of the value chain in collaboration with stakeholders, to undertake capacity building for prospective entrepreneurs,  consultancies promoting or facilitating business development, to make nutrihub a long term self-sustainable model by providing value added incubation services to entrepreneurs.

Nutrihub incubation was designed to help nuticereal startup grow in streamlined by providing them they required technology and business support system, key focused areas are technology consultancy like registration, licenses, technology transfer and commercialization, Business facilitations like assistance with business plan development, marketing strategies and their connects with backward and forward market linkages, mentoring and networking on knowledge and skill enhancement through technical and business training, networking and access to technical and business mentors/ experts, infrastructure facilities like facilitation of product development and access to R&D labs, production facilities, plug and play office spaces and meeting rooms etc., Access of funding assistance in preparation of business plans, proposals and pitch decks, linkages with banks, other financial institutions and investors, major part of this nutrihub is awareness promoting of incubated startups and nutritional  merits of millets for acceptance among the consumers, under this nutrihub incubation startups incubated- 13, technologies commercialized-44, products suppoeted-378, millets product technologies available for commercialization-60 and total no. of technologies transferred to entrepreneurs and industries-68. At last they feedback from participants, they identify who are interested on startup ignition with the millets value addition and they gave training certificate to each person who are participate on that training session.

Conclusion: 

By this training IIMR how they gave support to new entrepreneurs through nutrihub how they support, incubation and value addition technology, they gave complete guidelines to the entrepreneurs starting ending process of the product output through they selected value addition line, it was very useful to the farmer by these value addition here farmer use this process to production they get more benefits compare to the production, here wastage levels are in low, if any product adopt this value addition process producer/ entrepreneurs/ investors get more profits compare to the production.

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