IIITH, Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology and The smart city mission launch Smart city startup Challenge

Smart city living labs at IIIT Hyderabad in association with Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology and The smart city mission have launched a Smart city Startup challenge. The program is envisioned to support and scale startups that are building sustainable, inclusive and innovative solutions for smart cities. The month-long program gives selected startups an opportunity to pitch to smart city technology MNCs, smart city officials  and the winner will get an equity-free grant of 10 Lakhs for further development.

According to Ramesh Loganathan , Professor- Co-Innovation and Head Research/Innovation Outreach, “The Smart City Living Lab is an attempt to discover cutting edge innovations with smart city use cases and enrich them with our knowledge from research.  This Startup Challenge will help discover innovations to enable Smart Cities. The winning teams will get capital, network and knowledge support”.

The focus areas for the challenge are water, waste, safety & security, health and energy. Any startups with solutions or products with smart city use cases can apply,  especially tech startups working with products with smart city use cases, market ready products with or without customers (revenue is desirable), expertise in commercially deploying the solution and research with market ready products, Application deadline is 1 June 2021.

Smart city technology can make cities more effective and efficient, which is necessary given the projected rapid growth in urban populations over the next few decades. Living labs is all about using technology and data purposefully to make better decisions and deliver a better quality of life. By connecting startups with those searching for smart city solutions, the program will amplify  the transformation of city infrastructure. Living Labs is also currently running the Water challenge in association with Government of Telangana & NIUM to find viable solutions to the problems faced regarding water quality, supply and non-revenue water by cities in Telangana.

The Smart City Research Center is set up with support from MEITY (Government of India), Smart City Mission and Government of Telangana at IIITH. The research center includes a Living Lab, that is a setup with support from EBTC and Amsterdam Innovation Arena.There is a huge push for smart cities in India under the Smart Cities Mission, a new initiative by the Government of India to drive economic growth and improve the quality of life of people by enabling local development and harnessing technology to create smart outcomes for citizens. In this ambitious project, 100 cities are being covered for the duration of 5 years with a budget of Rs.100 crore per city per year. The goal of the Living Lab plan is to create an urban area enhancing three value domains: social, economic and environmental. Thus developed Living Lab shall enable the following: 1)Get expertise in IoT for Smart Cities related research and deployment 2)Generate data for research 3)Creation of a viable innovation and demand driven ecosystem in universities.4)Provide a test bench for IoT based Smart City implementations to start-ups as well as big companies

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