Over time, many support mechanisms were established to nurture entrepreneurs. Business incubators are one of them. These incubation centers aim towards helping startups in their survival and growth, especially during their fragile and early stages. 

NSRCEL is one such incubator. Located in IIM Bangalore, attracts entrepreneurs from across the country to make a difference by building their execution capabilities to launch and scale their startups. With programs catering to entrepreneurs with profit ventures, social ventures and startups by student and young engineers and women entrepreneurs, NSRCEL offers its support to various players of the startup ecosystem. It is supported, among others, by the Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) of NITI Aayog, by the Government of India through the Department of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. 

NSRCEL is also the first incubator with a program tailored for social entrepreneurs and their unique challenges. The non- profit incubator, a first of its kind in the country, was launched in April 2017- NSRCEL Social Ventures Incubation Program. 

The NSRCEL Social Ventures Incubation Program aims to identify, select, engage, and support early-stage social ventures with innovative solutions to tackle the country’s pressing social problems with high growth potential to build business models for sustained impact. It aims to address the lack of effective support system for early stage social enterprises by mentoring and capacity building, leveraging their rich network of subject matter experts, entrepreneurs and academicians; providing access to connects across funders, government and other players in the ecosystem; providing advisory support in legal, financial and HR aspects; ensuring their visibility through an annual calendar of activities; and enabling three-pronged mechanism of self, peer to peer and mentor review.

Besides this, the centre conducts onsite reviews where the NSRCEL team and mentors engage with the ventures and their stakeholder on the field to bring in deeper insights and solutions. This opens doors for the startups to a larger ecosystem through in-house and external networking events, workshops, and conferences and brings in more clarity to these ventures in terms of strategies and impact and help them create sustainable and scalable roadmap.

There is a pressing need for high quality non-profits/ social enterprises with a growing pool of philanthropic and CSR money to contribute to social development. Realizing this, NSRCEL is working towards bridging this gap in helping the ventures build themselves upto their highest potential.

Activities at NSRCEL are helping ventures to become grant ready and pitch for funders, investors, and partners with clear value propositions. The NSRCEL ecosystem is opening doors for collaboration within cohorts and beyond. However, as an incubator there is a constant demand to evolve and grow as per the needs of the budding ventures and other stakeholders, while we continue to expand our ecosystem by bringing in more partners to enhance the impact. NSRCEL also in a way is creating a portfolio of promising ventures for funders to invest as a follow-on funding.

Sharing his thoughts on the centre’s partnership with Capgemini, Professor Venkatesh Panchapagesan, Chair, NSRCEL and faculty in the Finance at IIMB said, “We are delighted to have Capgemini join us in supporting social enterprises, especially during these trying times. Our partnership is a unique one as this is the first time that we are making a multi-year commitment to our start-ups to help them scale their operations and enhance their impact.”

So far, NSRCEL has incubated over 225 ventures, engaged over 46,000 entrepreneurs, created 5,000 jobs, and raised $1.5 billion combined value of the start-ups till date. NSRCEL Social Incubation Centre has raised a fund of INR 12,50,00,000 till date and has supported 60 social ventures. With its presence in more than 20 states, it has reached over 5,000 schools and 80 communities, touching the lives of more than 12,00,000 beneficiaries. 

While expressing his gratitude, Sahithya Anumolu, Co-founder at Inqui-lab Foundation (which was incubated at NSRCEL) said, “As a start-up social entrepreneur, sessions at NSRCEL have instilled a framework of thought that helps us brainstorm via various lenses of organisation building - whether program design, finance, sustainability, or impact. The best part about NSRCEL is the number of ventures that pass through its doors due to the launchpad program. This gives NSRCEL a clear view of what is already being tried in the space. The on-going reviews with mentors helped us internally reflect from time to time, akin to having an official organizational advisory board. The opportunities to pitch to our mentors, alongside external funders, have helped us better articulate and refine our vision and offering.”