The Ministry of Education (MoE) launched the Institution’s Innovation Council (IIC) through the MoE’s Innovation Cell in association with the AICTE for Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) to systematically foster the culture of innovation and start-up ecosystem in education institutions. The main aim of IIC is to engage the corpus of faculty, students and staff in various innovation and entrepreneurship related activities ranging from ideation to pre-incubation/ incubation stage; inclusive of Problem solving, Proof of Concept development, Design Thinking, IPR, etc., so that innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem gets established and stabilized in HEIs.

The IIC model is designed to address the existing challenges/issues in HEIs such as less numbers, occasional and unplanned Innovation & Entrepreneurship (I&E) activities organised in HEIs with low involvement of top leadership, lack of coherence and absence of synergy in resource mobilization, deployment and underutilization of creative potential of youths as major barrier for vibrant I&E ecosystem to emerge from HEIs.