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Ahmedabad (Gujarat) [India], December 30: Ideas can be worth billions of dollars, as unicorns in India and around the world have shown. And this is what Gujarat University’s Startup and Entrepreneurship Council (GUSEC) seeks to achieve with his two ambitious programs that foster young innovators.
The first program is the Vikram Sarabhai Children Innovation Center (VSCIC). It is envisioned as a platform to institutionalize the work of GUSEC and UNICEF to identify, nurture and foster innovation by children. VSCIC acts as an idea incubator for school children with innovative skills. Upskilling and educating schoolchildren to develop critical and design thinking skills through elaborate MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), bringing together stakeholders in innovation and education to help foster child innovators. It also helps us co-create opportunities synergistically. ecosystem.
The second program, the National Children’s Innovation Challenge (NCIC), also a joint initiative with UNICEF, identifies and supports child-led innovation and identifies the best young innovators in the country. NCIC aims to scout innovative ideas by children that solve problems related to or aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals.
“The purpose of the Vikram Sarabhai Children’s Innovation Center and the National Children’s Innovation Challenge is to foster ideas and innovation among schoolchildren and to undertake focused efforts to support innovation and entrepreneurship. The initial response and results have been very encouraging and we are confident that we will be able to identify some great ideas and help young innovators bring them to life.
NCIC solicits submissions from children across the country to solve modern problems and hopes to expose more than 100,000 children to innovation and entrepreneurship. Benefits include up to two years of incubation support at GUSEC, electronic certification for all participants, mentorship, guidance, networking, and access to government grants and funding. About 500 startup teams of young entrepreneurs will be identified as part of NCIC and nurtured through VSCIC.
NCIC is an extension of GUSEC’s Children’s Innovation Festival (CIF), with over 3,100 children submitting ideas across two editions.
One of the ideas is an environmentally friendly cement-like product. A class 9 student at Ahmedabad International School, he Atharv Shah came up with the idea of ​​making cement/concrete from plastic waste and glass bottles. He was inspired to see people disposing of waste outside their homes.
Atharv’s idea was shortlisted by GUSEC in 2021, with support and expert guidance provided through online sessions. Afterwards, he was introduced to an offline bootcamp where he became innovation-aware and a GUSEC startup where he was taught about design thinking by ecosystem experts and mentors.
With the support of GUSEC, he visited several cement plants to conduct further research. His learning enabled him to find ways to use waste materials to make products and make them more cost-effective. The innovation is still in the research and development stage, and Atharv has not yet calculated the cost of the product. This is another challenge that we hope to overcome with the help of VSCIC.
For more information, please visit https://gusec.edu.in/.
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