CHENNAI: After being honoured with the title of ‘best performer state’ in creating a strong startup ecosystem by Startup India, Tamil Nadu has come up with a comprehensive framework designed to assess and enhance the maturity of incubators in the state.
This self-evaluating tool for incubation centres present in the state evaluates and elevates the effectiveness and impact of the centres. The state has over 8,000 startups and is equipped with more than 120 incubation centres to nurture these startups.
Known as ‘Tamil Nadu Incubators Maturity Model (TNIMM)’, it was launched by MSME Minister TM Anbarasan at the Tamil Nadu Startup Incubators Summit organised by StartupTN in Chennai on Thursday. Archana Patnaik, secretary for MSME Department, and Sivarajah Ramanathan, Mission Director and CEO of StartupTN, were present.
Given the diversity of Tamil Nadu incubators in terms of location, funding, domain and business model, TNIMM is framed as a maturity model based approach which vastly differs from the well-known ranking model. It consists of eight reform areas which include management and strategy; knowledge and expertise; finance; human resource; physical infrastructure; networking ecosystem; social impact and results and outcome, said Ramanathan.
These eight reform areas spread across 77 key performance indicators act as platform to create a strong operational strategy for a business incubator.
Based on these parameters, the incubators are assessed on five maturity levels starting from aspirant, intermediate, competent, proficient and expert. For the assessment, the age of incubators is categorised as those falling up to four years; four years to eight years and over eight years, he said.