Inauguration of the Ideas to Impacts HQ and Alacrity India Innovation Center
February 22nd 2019 was a big day for us. The Ideas to Impacts (I2I) Building in the Baner area of Pune was inaugurated by such eminent personalities as Dr. R. A. Mashelkar, Former Director General of CSIR, Sir Terry Matthews, Founder and Chairman of Wesley Clover, Mr. Kiran Karnik, ex-President of Nasscom and Ms. Annie Dubé, Consul General for Canada in Mumbai. Many ecosystem leaders graced the occasion – Anand Deshpande of Persistent Systems, Shashi Chaudhary, Nagpur’s senior-most entrepreneur and investor, Investment firms Pitre Ventures and Enemtech, Commodore Anand Khandekar, among others.
The building is bang in the middle of Baner road area, which is becoming quite the hot-spot in Pune, India’s fast-growing innovation and startup hub.
Some of you may be aware of the I2I “small town” model of delivering IT services from non-metros. (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/distributing-future-evenly-gireendra-kasmalkar/). We already have a successful center running in Rajgurunagar. Then why a big building in Pune? Well, sustainable jobs even in small towns can only be around cutting-edge technologies, such as AI / ML, IoT, SAP, PLM, Low Code, Digital, which need a pyramid of seniors in our metro office and juniors trained by them in the small towns. The building will house the headquarter of I2I – the metro layer of our small town pyramid – for our business heads to run their practices. They will connect with technology partners, some of whom may even have their offices in our building. Our customers in Rajgurunagar, Rajeev Jorapur, CIO, Bajaj and managers at Siemens PLM joined us at the inauguration.
The building also is the home to the Alacrity India Innovation Center. Again, from the blog referred above, some of you may be aware of Alacrity India fund, Pune’s first SEBI registered VC fund. It is co-promoted by I2I and Wesley Clover as Lead Investors. From Wesley Clover, Greg Vanclief, their MD and Mike Manson, General Partner at Alacrity India were present at the inauguration, as were Hubli Angels, investors in our fund as a syndicate.
We bring to India the Alacrity program from Canada, UK, Turkey, France and Mexico for creating successful start-ups. Their market and technology risks are systematically reduced with the help of the 100+ companies in the Wesley Clover ecosystem. Of course, it requires not just funds, but incubation, acceleration and high touch mentoring, which the Alacrity India innovation center will facilitate. It is already selected by Niti Aayog as an Atal Incubation Center. All incubatees, not just our portfolio companies, can benefit from the Alacrity ecosystem and methodology.
The idea stage floor will seat the very early entrepreneurs and start-ups, whereas acceleration stage floor, the slightly more advanced startups. Most “happening” would be the Cafeteria floor, which will be the place for all kinds of regular events – expert talks, corporate connects and experience sharing.
The design of the building fully captures this vision of promoting innovation and entrepreneurship. The digital printing of trees on the façade is a first in Pune! Trees represent Growth that emerges from the ecosystem, which in our case, stretches from Baner and Pune to our small towns and Hubli on the one hand, and to the global locations of Alacrity and Wesley Clover, on the other. Sun powers the growth of trees, and the Sunrise colour (from the I2I logo) on the Eastern side of the building symbolises energy of the youth that powers our growth.
Do visit us, tech professionals, entrepreneurs, start-ups, mentors, tech partners, corporate partners, investors, even other incubators and funds. This building is poised to be an integrated hub for all of us to work together to promote innovation and entrepreneurship in India.
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