Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain, classmates from the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, were barely into their first jobs when they decided to build a new design for lithium ion batteries. Mehta remembered a couple of college seniors starting businesses with the help of IIT-M. They reached out to their professor, R Krishnakumar, for support. This was in late 2012.Krishnakumar assured them of all possible support and urged them to come back to IIT-M as project associates. Their project transformed into an electric vehicle and their company, Ather Energy, is preparing to roll out its first smart scooter, S340. The company is backed by Hero Motocorp, India’s largest two-wheeler firm.Ather Energy is one of several product and intellectual property-led startups to have emerged of the lush green environs of IIT-M. The premier engineering institute is arguably at the forefront of pushing product innovation in the country.This has been possible not due to any single spectacular effort but because of IIT-M doing several simple things right — creating a thriving alumni network, pushing a faculty-industry connect, providing the necessary infrastructure to let students and alumni experiment with ideas, and importantly, listening to feedback and learning on the move.Since 2006, 140 startups have been a part of the IIT-M Incubation Cell . Of these, 32 startups have raised a total $108 million from investors, with Ather pocketing a chunk of it. “Success breeds success,” said Mehta. “When we started, a couple of our seniors had… (made) successful hardware attempts. The community builds up. They encourage each other.”The efforts to establish a startup ecosystem within the institute began more than two decades ago, with the Telecommunications and Computer Networking Group (TeNeT) within IIT-M.The group consisted of Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala, a Padma Shri awardee and until recently an adviser to the government on its electric vehicle programme, and Professor Bhaskar Ramamurthi, now the director of IIT-M.“Going back, you will see that IIT-M was more industry-facing than any of the other IITs (there are 23),” said Mahesh Panchagnula, associate faculty-in-charge of the IIT-M Incubation Cell. Panchagnula, an alumnus of IIT-M, is a professor of applied mechanics at the institute.“In some sense, the IIT-M faculty were more grounded in real-life problems. A big push in this direction came because of a small group of people in the wireless technology group… Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala and Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi, the whole idea of doing startups, we must say, is because of them.” TeNeT, even two decades ago, championed startups. The faculty raised money from companies that could potentially be users of products developed by startups emerging from TeNeT, and went about seeding those startups.“There was no ecosystem,” said Ramamurthi. “Basically, some of us felt that to create products we needed to work with companies. We raised money from industry that would be beneficiaries of those products... this went partly to the project and partly to IIT-M. Slowly, with angel funding coming in, we could get money to some of the startups.”If one part of the effort was to encourage students, the other crucial aspect was to push faculty to interact more with industry and understand the challenges they faced. “When faculty members work with the industry, they get an idea as to what kind of problems the industry has, the kind of products that need to be built, and the things that need to be done,” said Jhunjhunwala. “What happens is that gradually, as the faculty do this, they start incorporating this in their undergraduate teaching.”A major step in bringing faculty and industry together was the establishment of the IIT-M Research Park, an independent company promoted by IIT-M and its alumni, in 2010. The park, situated behind the institute, facilitates the promotion of research and development by the institute in partnership with industry.It was modeled on the lines of research parks at Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University. The IIT-M Research Park now also houses the IIT-M Incubation Cell, which was established in 2013.“We got support from the government (to set up an incubator). First, for ruraltech (Rural Technology and Business Incubator, or RTBI, started in 2006). It was first in the country and very successful,” said Ramamurthi.RTBI’s mission was to incubate startups with a focus on leveraging information and communication technologies. It now functions under the IIT-M Incubation Cell, which is the umbrella organisation for the other two sector-specific incubators at the institute as well—one focused on bio-tech and the other on medical technology.For undergraduate students of IIT-M, there’s a pre-incubator of sorts, called Nirmaan. Students get small grants to test their ideas while still studying. The successful ones go on to fight for a place at the IIT-M Incubator Cell.“(At) Nirmaan, presently, we have 27 teams masquerading as companies. They will look like a company. We want them to behave as a company. When they come for funding, we treat them as a company,” said Panchagnula. “There are no risks attached. Whatever money is given to them, it is like a project. For example, we have a group of students try- ing shared cycles, geared for the academic campus market. They had to buy cycles... now, they have 1,400 rides on 30 bicycles, with 500 registered users in a week.”In all this rush, the constant was the unwavering support of the alumni.From making industry connects to pooling in resources, the alumni have gone the extra mile. “We had a group of alumni thinking ‘how do we make a startup ecosystem happen at IIT-M.’ People like Anand Rajaraman of Junglee, Kris Gopalakrishnan, Desh Deshpande and many others… they brought their networks and also seed capital,” said Panchagnula.“They helped us form some of these structures to invest in startups, through grants and loans. It is one thing to have a good group of people inside IIT-M to drive this—we always had that—but to scale up, we require this network.”The Gopalakrishnan Deshpande Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship was launched at IIT-M in January with half a million dollars each from Jaishree Deshpande and Gururaj Deshpande of the Deshpande Foundation and former Infosys CEO S. Gopalakrishnan. They will fund $5 million over five years.A serious incubation cell is hardly the place for a Rajinikant-inspired room, but there it is. It has mug shots of the superstar in various filmy avatars adorning its walls.An auto-rickshaw juts out from a wall—a motif borrowed from Rajini’s 1995 hit movie Baasha. It is a meeting room of sorts. A chill place on a floor where every other room is taken by startups solving industry problems. The Rajini room is vibrant, just like the palpable energy on the floor. The startups on the floor are tackling various issues—cargo transportation, underwater robotics, oil and gas inspection, among those.The incubation cell handholds entrepreneurs right from setting up companies to finding connects. “The incubation cell helps in accounting and legal, apart from providing a shared working space and other paraphernalia. The incubated companies do not need to worry about anything. They get some funding and depending on their progress, can ask for more. It comes as equity,” said Gopal S, a former managing director at chemicals company Chemplast Sanmar who is now a mentor at the incubation cell.Visakh Sasikumar, CEO of Pi Beam, which makes pedal-assisted three-wheelers to transfer cargo, is a beneficiary of this ecosystem.“When we built our first prototype, we didn’t (have to buy) any materials—solar panels, batteries, cycle rickshaw, all these were sponsored by the IIT-M ecosystem. There are people who help in handholding. We didn’t even know that we had to do a sales tax return,” he said.Sasikumar, who is pursuing an MS in Entrepreneurship from IIT-M, also thinks the mentor clinics provided by the cell are crucial in helping entrepreneurs find answers to hard problems.“Mentoring clinics happen every Friday. (Entrepreneurs) can ask for three mentors, whoever is available. There are also journey mentors, who stay with a company for its whole journey,” said Gopal S. He is a journey mentor for IIT-M Incubation Cell companies DeTect Technologies, which focuses on the oil and gas sector, and underwater robotics firm Planys Technologies.“The ecosystem supports you in such a way that you can start right out of your lab. You can use best-in-class facilities to build and test your product. IIT-M helps take the product to the industry, which takes you a mile ahead,” said Tarun Kumar Mishra, cofounder of DeTect, which counts RIL and Bharat Petroleum among clients.The mentors usually focus on factors other technical advice. The idea is to make the incubatees entrepreneurs and not just inventors. “We work to guide them on the non-technical part—things like hiring, pricing. I come here one Friday every month,” said Venkat Viswanathan, IIT-M alumnus and chairman at data analytics firm LatentView.Overtime, the incubation cell has also built relationships with mentors outside the IIT-M network and has been successful in getting funding from companies for its startup funding pool.“Many of our alumni, both in the US and India, they created this fund. We used to call it innovation fund... it has become a fairly large corpus,” said Tamaswati Ghosh, CEO of IIT-Madras Incubation Cell, declining to disclose the size of the corpus.“We have alumni donation, grants from government. Corporate Social Responsibility has become a big contributor in recent years— Titan, Goldman Sachs, American Express and others help us.”Panchagnula is not content yet. “We are not successful by global standards yet. We have some way to go,” he said. “But IIT-M is the number one-ranked institution for engineering. We also have the number one academic incubator. It is a rare combination, even globally.”In India, several other IITs as well as BITS-Pilani are gaining ground as ecosystems for product startups. Panchagnula’s idea for the path forward is simple: open the doors to more people not from the IITs to bring diversity, and target emerging sectors. “We are at the leading-edge of a hockey stick,” said Panchagnula.