Our Contributors
Chief Editor
Hiran Vedam
Dr Hiran Vedam is a business consultant for investors and start-ups in climate tech. She is also Senior Advisor for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at IIT Tirupati. She has considerable experience in different areas of the lab-to-market journey from research to entrepreneurship, technology transfer and early stage investments in the US, UK, Singapore and India. She has a YouTube channel—WorldofDeeptech—to familiarise young researchers on various aspects of commercialising advanced technologies. She also developed a ‘Mentoring Framework’ for guiding mentors of science-based start-ups in collaboration with a seasoned angel investor.
Hiran has a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University, MBA from INSEAD, MS from Washington University and BTech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
Expert Contributors
Anurag Mairal
Dr Anurag Mairal is Adjunct Professor of Medicine and Director of Global Outreach Programs at Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign, Stanford University. He is also a Faculty Fellow and Lead for Technology Innovation and Impact at Center for Innovation in Global Health. He serves as the Founding Chair of BME IDEA APAC, a community of medtech innovation programmes in the Asia Pacific. Concurrently, he is a co-founder and Executive Vice President of Orbees Medical, a SF Bay Area-based strategy consulting firm serving the global healthcare industry, with a focus on medtech, pharmaceutical and digital health industries. Recently, he took a sabbatical for two years to take a senior leadership role at PATH, a major global health nonprofit based in Seattle. Previously, he held several positions at Johnson & Johnson, including Business Development Director and Product Director for structural heart, cardiology, and peripheral vascular products at Cordis. An active mentor to entrepreneurs and industry professionals, he serves as the chair of PATH’s Bay Area Leadership Council, board member at EPPIC Global Network and IIT Bombay Heritage Foundation and advisory board member at D-Rev and Sewa International. He recently took over as the President Sewa International Bay Area. Dr Mairal holds a Phd in Chemical Engineering, a MS in Chemical Engineering and a MBA. Dr. Mairal was a post- doctoral fellow at the University of Twente, Netherlands and at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His work has been published in more than 30 publications, and he has seven patents to his credit.
Ashley Stevens
Dr Stevens is President of the Focus IP Group and has almost forty years of technology commercialisation experience in the biotechnology industry. He is a former President of AUTM and has lectured and published extensively on valuing technologies, technology transfer, licensing and the commercialisation of early-stage technologies. Deeply embedded in the Boston ecosystem, Dr Stevens spent ten years with entrepreneurial biotechnology companies, co-founding two of them, and then became Director of the Technology Transfer office at Boston University for 17 years, following four years in a similar role at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a teaching affiliate of the Harvard Medical School. He currently advises the Forsyth Institute, an affiliate of the Harvard Dental School. He has helped create over 60 spin-out companies from these institutions, a number of which raised substantial amounts of venture capital.
Chintan Vaishnav
Dr Chintan Vaishnav is a socio-technologist, an engineer trained to design and build large-scale systems that possess both human as well as technological complexities. Presently, he serves as the Mission Director for Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), a flagship initiative of the government of India under the auspices of the NITI Aayog. Dr Vaishnav is on leave from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for his present assignment. As a teacher, innovator, and entrepreneur, he has split his time between teaching and research at MIT and living and working with rural communities in India to build solutions that can overcome constraints fundamental to improving human conditions.
Hasit Seth
Hasit Seth works as a counsel in the Bombay High Court. His key focus is on arbitrations and civil and writ litigation. He has negotiated many deals, most of them involving technology and related services. Over the past 20 years, he has been a partner at a law firm, general counsel for a MNC and a start-up founder, and has worked in the US with two law firms doing patent litigation and prosecution.
Kaushik Gala
Kaushik Gala has 20-plus years of experience as a business development professional, including stints at multinational companies, boutique consulting firms and start-ups. He holds BE, MS, and MBA degrees. He continues to mentor start-up founders while pursuing his PhD in Entrepreneurship at Iowa State University.
M V Shankar
Dr Shankar is the Vice-President, Technology Innovation at Mahindra and Mahindra Group and has featured in the top 50 Innovative Leaders by World Innovation Congress 2020. He is co-inventor on ten granted US patents and five granted Indian patents and has coached over 2,000 innovators. A technology innovation leader, he is passionate about facilitating technology innovations in India. He excels in mentoring inventors to grow their ideas into innovations.
Nevan Hanumara
Dr Hanumara is a Research Scientist in MIT’s Mechanical Engineering department, where he focuses on human-centred design of healthcare technologies, with an approach that is collaborative, translational and entrepreneurial. In parallel with MIT, he works with and mentors multiple healthcare-focused start-ups in Cambridge and worldwide and serves as an advisor to the New England Medical Innovation Center.
Premnath V
Dr Premnath is Head, NCL Innovations at CSIR- NCL and Founder Director, Venture Center (National award winning inventive enterprises and deep tech incubator). He is a technology developer, innovation and incubation manager, start-up mentor and a co-founder of two medtech start-ups. One of his inventions—a breakthrough material for hip and knee joint replacements—has been implanted in more than a million patients worldwide. Another technology for porous maxillo-facial implants has been implanted in thousands of patients in India and abroad. He has provided leadership for teams that have won national awards for technology development, intellectual property management and business incubation. He is a chemical engineer and an alumnus of MIT in the USA, IIT-Bombay (Distinguished Alumnus, 2022) and has been a Chevening Technology Enterprise Scholar in Cambridge, UK.
Ravi Sarangapani
Mr Ravi Sarangapani is a medical device consultant with over 25 years in the medical device industry encompassing leadership roles in new product development, quality management and regulatory affairs, marketing, sales and business development. He has a proven track record of managing the new product development process from conceptualisation and market analysis through development, risk management, pre-clinical evaluation, verification and validation, test marketing to commercialisation. He is especially skilled at problem analysis and resolution, strategic planning and budget controls. He also has a strong background of interactions with key opinion leaders, customers and trade channels throughout Asia, Middle East, Africa and some areas of Europe.
Satya Dash
Dr Satya Dash is a national innovation ecosystem designer, technology strategist, policy and implementation expert. He has contributed to the growth of Indian biotech and medtech innovation landscape by designing, implementing and driving 17 national programmes when he was the Founding Head Strategy at DBT-BIRAC and In-Charge Head of IP & TT such as BIG (India’s largest biotech/medtech program), social innovation (SPARSH), equity (BIRAC SEED & AcE), incubation (BioNEST) and BIRAC-Nesta Discovery Awards and BIRAC-PATH (for IP). Cumulatively, more than 2,000 start-ups/innovators have been supported by the programmes. He also built 12 partnerships for BIRAC (Nesta, Wish Foundation, TiE, Indian Angel Network). Previously he was COO ABLE (nodal biotech industry body) and former Director Global Innovations at PATH and Consultant to Nesta. Currently he is a board member at Venture Center. He holds a triple Masters from the universities of Cambridge (UK), Leicester (UK) and Sambalpur (India) and a PhD from University of East Anglia, UK.
Shailendra Vyakarnam
Dr Shailendra Vyakarnam is presently Visiting Professor at Cranfield University and also Associate of the Senior Combination Room at Kings College Cambridge. Dr Vyakarnam has mentored hundreds of deep tech entrepreneurs and co-founded several businesses over his career. More recently he has invested as a business angel in seven firms, three of which are led by female entrepreneurs. He has published a dozen books, supervised doctoral students, published in academic journals, advised policy makers and held various board positions.
Soma C
Soma has more than nine years of industrial R&D experience in a MNC in the field of speciality materials for electronics, post her MSc in Chemistry from Calcutta University.
Soma leads the Incubation & Mentoring vertical of Venture Center. At Venture Center she is responsible for managing the overall incubation activities beginning with identification of promising start-ups and innovators, providing mentoring/advice, conceptualising and implementing relevant programmes and contributing to the creation of a conducive innovation ecosystem and tracking its impact.
She serves as the nominee director on the boards of two deep science and technology start-ups in the domain of Med device and energy storage.
Soma is a recipient of the Chevening Gurukul Fellowship for Leadership and Excellence from DPIR, Oxford University. She was also winner of DST & ISBA Star Gazing Award for Incubation Managers 2016.
Srikant Sastri
Mr Srikant Sastri is the President of the TiE Delhi-NCR Chapter, the chairman of the i3g Network and the co-founder of Crayon Data. As an entrepreneur with two successful exits, he now is a mentor on a mission to help start-ups become successful. Srikant is a Board member of Venture Center and is Advisor and Mentor in Digital Innovation and a social enterprise evangelist.
Srivardhini Jha
Srivardhini K Jha is an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB). Her research interest is in innovation and entrepreneurship in the emerging country context. She has published papers in several prestigious journals such as MIS Quarterly, MIT Sloan Management Review and Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. She has co- edited a book titled Shifting Orbits: Decoding the Trajectory of the Indian Startup Ecosystem, which was published in 2021. She works closely with many start-ups, mentoring and advising them. She has also contributed to policy formulation around innovation and entrepreneurship both at the national and state government levels.
Sujata Bogawat
CA Sujata Bogawat is the founding director of AvantEdge Business Consulting Pvt Ltd. She is a Chartered Accountant and MBA with over two decades of experience in start-ups, strategy, consulting, compliance and financial matters. She specialises in advising VC funded start-ups and start-ups incubators across the country. As a Director at AvantEdge, she leads the start-up consulting function and advises start-ups on investment transactions, valuation, compliance and good governance. She has a strong eco-system connect with start-up incubators and academic institutions such as Venture Center, Villgro Foundation, CIBA and RISE Foundation-IISER Kolkata, and serves on various committees of these incubators. Previously Sujata has been the Vice President Finance of Firstcry.com and Finance Controller at Thermax Ltd.
Sundara Nagarajan
Sundara Nagarajan (‘SN’) passionately helps technologists develop and scale their innovations to a thriving business and positively impact the world. He is the Managing Director of Innovation Scaleup Advisors (ISA), an enterprise development firm that helps technology-led companies scale globally. ISA serves start-ups and incubators, providing venture assistance, investors to assess start-ups, and mature enterprises to adopt digital technologies.
Uday Phadke
Dr Phadke is the originator of the Triple Chasm Approach, which challenges many of the commonly held perceptions about how innovations are transformed to create commercial, social and environmental impact. His work over the last two decades has focused on how science and technology-enabled innovation is commercialised with notable publications which question conventional wisdom about how innovations can deliver impact. He is currently Chief Executive of Cartezia, Executive Chairman of Accelerator India, and Chief Executive of the Triple Chasm Company. He was an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Judge Business School at Cambridge University from 2011-2016.
Reviewers and Editorial Team
Anisha Bhasin
Anisha Bhasin has 11-plus years of consulting, management and marketing experience in the government, private and social sectors. She is currently working with Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog, in the Ecosystems Development and Partnerships team. Before joining NITI Aayog, she worked on several projects with various ministries and non-profits. She has co-founded two start-ups and has over six years of entrepreneurship experience. Anisha holds a Masters degree in Economics and has completed several post graduate courses in various disciplines.
Anmol Jaguste
Anmol Jaguste is a biomedical engineer from the University of Minnesota and holds two post graduate diplomas in Business (commercialisation) and BioInnovation from Monash University and the National University of Ireland, Galway, respectively. He has significant early stage medical device R&D experience, along with commercialisation planning experience working with start-ups, incubators and universities across USA, Australia, India and Ireland.
Anurag Wasnik
Anurag has over eight years of consulting, government affairs, social sector and public policy experience. He is currently working as the Innovation Lead with Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog, leading multiple strategic initiatives vital to the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Ecosystem building in India. Anurag holds three masters degrees – MBA, IIM-Ahmedabad, MSc in International Management, Bocconi Universita, Italy and MA in Sociology from IGNOU. Prior to NITI- Aayog, he has worked with multinationals such as Accenture Strategy, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, ITC and Tata Motors. He has co-founded two start-ups and has three years of entrepreneurship experience.
Ayesha Chaudhary
Dr Ayesha Chaudhary is working as an Officer on Special Duty (OSD) at the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Government of India. She was one of the founding team members for the Atal Innovation Mission. She started her innovation journey with a doctoral degree in biomedical engineering, later co-founded a medtech start-up and has also explored the corporate world.
Ishita Agrawal
Ishita Agrawal has over 15 years of experience focused on the early stage start-up ecosystem. She has been involved with multi-disciplinary responsibilities including programme design and management, policy planning and implementation, developing collaborations, consulting, operations and monitoring.
Part of the founding team of Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog (AIM), Ishita has been working at the intersection of policy, technology innovation and entrepreneurship. She has been a part of AIM’s journey as it progressed, creating impact at scale. She has been directly responsible for design and implementation of institution-building programmes that nurture tech entrepreneurs with a view to democratise innovation and entrepreneurship in the country.
Prior to AIM, she has worked with several business incubators in the public and private sector. She has also worked for a couple of years with EY’s Development Advisory Services team, gaining a good understanding of the functioning of the not-for-profit sector and CSR.
Manisha Premnath
Manisha Premnath is the Chief Operating Officer at Venture Center. She provides direction and leadership to the Executive team at Venture Center, besides being responsible for operations, strategy and general management.She is a Biotechnologist by training with a PhD from the University of Pune/CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory, Pune, India. She has carried out postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge,UK. Manisha was a Chevening Rolls Royce Science,Innovation, Policy and Leadership Programme (CRISP)Fellow at the Said Business School, University of Oxford,UK during 2015.
She serves on the Board of Directors of IPCALaboratories Private Limited (Indian pharma companylisted on BSE/NSE), amongst other companies.
Mudit Narain
Mudit Narain is currently working as the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) at the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Government of India. He was one of the founding team members for the Atal Innovation Mission. He has completed his Master’s degree in Engineering and Public Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Mugdha Lele
Mugdha is currently Head-Social Innovations at Venture Center, Pune. At Venture Center, she is responsible for driving the Social Innovations activities and providing technical mentoring for start-ups. She has a PhD from School of Health Sciences, University of Pune. She has been a Fellow of the Chevening Rolls Royce Science, Innovation, Policy and Leadership Programme (CRISP) at the Said Business School, University of Oxford, UK in 2016. She serves as the nominee director on the boards of three start-ups in the medical domain.
Neha Jacob
Neha has over 15 years of experience in the field of audit, accounts, general management and operations. She is a chartered accountant and a company secretary by qualification. At Venture Center, she is responsible for providing leadership towards general management, human resources and allied activities. She began her career with Ernst and Young (EY) and worked there for ten years, responsible for assignments related to audit and accounts. Prior to joining Venture Center, she pursued her interests in the development sector and worked with an Uttarakhand based NGO – Aarohi for five years.
Radha Madhab Mohanty
Dr Radha Madhab Mohanty is working as Principal Scientist at the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR).
Ramesh Loganathan
Ramesh Loganathan is Professor, Co-Innovation at IIIT Hyderabad. He served as a Chief Innovation Officer (interim) of TS State Innovation Cell. After 25 years in the product R&D space serving various executive positions in few of the world famous product companies, he moved full-time into academics.
Shruti Devasthali
Shruti Devasthali is Head-Funding and Investment vertical at Venture Center. She is a chartered accountant and a certified financial risk manager. She is currently operating seed fund activities for Venture Center and monitoring the investments in the organisation’s portfolio companies. She is also responsible for mentoring lab2mkt companies on corporate governance, and management of financial and legal matters relating to grant programmes. During her previous assignments Shruti has worked with CRISIL Limited and Dun and Bradstreet Information Services India Private Limited in the areas of credit and financial analysis.
Smita Kale
Smita is leading bio-incubation activities, Center for Biopharma Analysis (CBA) and BIRAC’s Regional Bioinnovation Center (BRBC) projects at Venture Center. Smita, as part of the incubation team, facilitates incubator operations by interacting with incubatees, infrastructure and facilities creation and development of the ecosystem.
She has a PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai, and has academic experience of 12 years which includes three plus years of research experience.
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our gratitude to:
Sponsors
Anjani Bansal, Hari Menon, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Other Contributors
Anita Sahadevan, Ashish Pandey, Lipika Biswas, Monisha Vaswani, Niruta Killedar, Pinky Raychaudhuri, Shelly Singh, Sumaiya Yousuf and Vinay Garg