"From ideas to business models, the innovation park will handhold students and innovators" ❤️

MCC’s Innovation Park – A First for Arts, Science Colleges in India!

24th June 2024 | Times of India

Today’s Times of India, Chennai Edition

Kannan, a banker, is interested to promote palm jaggery powder and other products as a healthy alternative to sugar. But he needs help in scaling up the product.

Similarly ideas such as making tiles using plastic waste, painting walls using bots, replacing unhealthy snacks with tasty millets are at various stages of transforming into startups and get incubated at Madras Christian College’s innovation park, the first-ever park in a liberal arts and science college in the country.

The 45,000 sqft ‘MCC-MRF Innovation Park’ which was built for ₹30 crore is likely to be opened in July. It boasts of facilities such as tinkering lab, rapid prototype lab, entrepreneurship café, co-working spaces writers corner and several meeting halls.

“From ideas to business models, the innovation park will handhold students and innovators. It was built under corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative by MRF,” said Paul Wilson, principal of MCC.

The building has a biophilic design integrating forest eco-system without cutting any trees and will meet 50% of its power demand through solar energy.

“Creating a culture of innovation in arts and science colleges will be a challenge. We are starting an innovators club and offer a one credit course on innovation,” Paul Wilson added.

Further, an internal assessment in the three-year degree programme will be devoted to ideation in which students will be awarded marks for potential innovative ideas.

The entrepreneurs café has four-seater and eight seater office space for small startups and they can rent the space. Further it also has a ‘pitch stage’ to showcase their projects to live audiences. Food-based startups also will be allowed to do pilot studies in the cafeteria. It will also have an amphitheater to host concerts, lectures and cultural performances.

The innovation park will also house five centres including nanomaterials research and innovations, computational informatics, big data analytics, psychometric research and business data analytics.

To keep the tradition of gutters in MCC, the innovation park also has a gutter classroom where students can attend meetings sitting on channel-like structures to discuss ideas.

The park also has research labs where students from all science departments can do interdisciplinary research.

“Any student or innovator, even from outside the college, can come and pitch the idea,” said C Aarthi Ram, head-operations, MCC-MRF Innovation Park.

In the first few months, the innovation park is expected to incubate around 30 startups.

“Our focus areas will be climate smart agriculture, precision healthcare, smart materials, ed-tech and livelihood empowerment. It will be one of the largest facilities dedicated for innovation in a liberal arts and science college," she said.