COMSATS Business Incubation Center launches a pre-incubation program for aspiring entrepreneurs

COMSATS Islamabad Campus has launched a pre-incubation program named as Idea2Startup (i2s) for its Business Incubation Center.

The program aims to be a guiding light for students looking to start their own companies after graduation. The purpose of this program is to help these students understand the intricacies involved in setting up a business, polishing their pitches, product validation, market segmentation, and team development to name a few.

The Business Incubation Center (BIC) at COMSATS Institute of Technology (CIIT) aims at commercialization of CIIT Research and Development, a milestone which can only be achieved through rapid and sustainable development of economy by deploying knowledge inputs to the society. Apart from that, Comsats Business Incubation Center is also hoping to prove itself instrumental in contributing towards improvement of socio-economic structure of Pakistan.

The incubation center offers a pre-incubation program for budding startups. Pre-startup is the essential phase for any start-up that wants to succeed. Entrepreneurs who are in the exploration stage of their business ideas, or even entrepreneurs with ready products but have yet to validate their ideas will benefit from going through the pre-startup program.The main objective of the pre-startup program is to support entrepreneurs in transforming their ideas into startup companies with marketable finished products and smart business plan.

The pre- startup program addresses these main objectives.

• Product validation- market validation
• Team development
• A duly approved coherent smart business plan
• A product/service ready to be offered to the market (validated prototype).
• Elevator pitch

Teams selected for the program will get access to a working space, any further required facilities, mentoring and coaching from the best names in the business and hours of invaluable networking with the right people. At the end, the top 3 graduates of the pre-startup program will get a cash prize as well.

The main contribution of Idea2Startup (i2s) Lab’s pre-startup program is that it will immensely improve the strength and survival capability of those companies entering the incubation process. Pre-selected teams presented their ideas, products as well as services in a presentation session at Business Incubation Center, CIIT Islamabad on the 1st of July, 2015.

Mr. Mushahid Hussain, Co-founder and Head of Products at Centangle (Pvt) Ltd, Haseeb Farooq CEO at Spearas and Atif Abdul Majeed, Chief Marketing Officer Cubator1ne participated in the event as judges. The event was also attended by the top names in the industry. 9 groups were pre-selected in initial screening process and presented their ideas, products and services in the i2s Labs presentation session.

After a rigorous process, 6 teams were selected teams (3-4 member each) got free space at i2s Labs. Here is a look at the pre-startup companies currently functioning at i2s Labs:

• ETA Technovations aim to provide android development, social media marketing services and e-commerce solutions.
• Mondo Solutions is a custom software and web development company that provides advance solutions for the web design & development, desktop applications, Web portals, social marketing and graphics designing.
• CodeDigita will create workforces to start in-house software development which would initially target the digital market. They also hope to take up ad-hoc software development and will provide software consultancy services to existing and new clients.
• Monami is an app that will use your phone camera to enable text in the real world (sign-boards, maps, business cards, brochures etc.) to become instantly more accessible. It will translate and also provide definitions of words from a built-in dictionary for newspaper readers.
• Stallion Tech aim to develop small smart devices and assembling them to achieve objective of home automation. The idea for their startup is 3G Houses — a system of home automation in which every appliance of the home is fully automated and controlled by a smartphone.
• Next Generation Sequencing Analysis is a new and innovative research and development project in the field of Next Generation Sequence Analysis. These days, biological researchers have to use command line tools for data analysis which is difficult for non-computer professionals as they have to do it manually. Their idea is to develop Windows-based tools for data analysis which will help researchers to analyse data without using command line approaches.

Once a pre-startup group is selected at i2s Labs, it stays there for 6 months. Based on their performance, a startup might graduate after 6 months. BIC is also planning to organize Business Plan completion at University Level which would help the budding entrepreneurs to take part in competitions and get a chance to become a part of Business Incubation Center-i2s Labs.