The State could ride the wave of opportunities in the post-pandemic world by leveraging its already established edge in nurturing hardware start-ups and the inevitable acceleration towards indigenisation in product development, said Prasad Balakrishnan Nair, Chief Executive Officer of Maker Village.

Speaking to The Hindu about the immediate challenges and future prospects of hardware start-ups in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mr. Nair said that the new Foreign Direct Investments norms brought about by the Centre targeting countries which share a land border with India were indicative of the realisation about the need for self-reliance.

“The vacuum to be created in the wake of such an inward looking policy environment will provide product start-ups with immense opportunities. Already, the crisis has witnessed unleashing of the innovative spirit and the entrepreneurial energy of start-ups and MSMEs in rolling out products and solutions to counter the pandemic, and even if 25% of those initiatives were to bear fruit, then it will be a big leap,” Mr. Nair said.

Apart from outright new innovations, improvising or reconfiguring existing product designs to cater for the evolving new markets will help hardware start-ups harness the new-found vitality in the sector post-pandemic.

“Some of the product start-ups may have to rewrite their priorities and reformulate their innovation contours since the assumptions upon which their business models were built may not be relevant in the new normal,” he said.

Preferred destination

The Kalamassery-based Maker Village, which is a joint initiative of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the Kerala government, has emerged as the preferred destination of hardware start-ups from across the country with the number of start-ups soaring from 35 to the current 86 in less than two years.

“We are curating 10 cutting-edge innovations while another five are on the anvil since being made a partner of the Defence Ministry’s Innovation for Defence Excellence scheme last November,” said Mr. Nair. Maker Village has also become the nodal centre for piloting the social innovation programme of the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council of the Department of Bio Technology.