SV.CO to Roll Out Nationwide Four-phase Campaign in Engineering College

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM:
Starting with Kerala, SV.CO, the world’s first digital incubator for students, will roll out on August 3, an ambitious four-phase nationwide campaign — #StartInCollege — to give a cutting edge to its programme of building student startups from engineering colleges across the country.
The campaign, spread over four months till November this year, will kick start from College of Engineering (CET), Trivandrum.
The chief objective of the campaign is to select 50 top students’ teams for the SV.CO  programme and help them select an idea, build a product and launch to early customers in six months with the last week in Silicon Valley in the USA.
Startup Village Chairman Sanjay Vijayakumar said the campaign, based on the Hub and Spoke model, would cover the six states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Telengana, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat in Phase 1.
“With engineering colleges re-opening after the summer vacation, we have decided to launch the  #StartInCollege campaign from CET on August 3. During the next three months, we will be rolling out the campaign across the country in three more phases,” he informed.
In Kerala, Vijayakumar, along with Startup Village Founding CEO Sijo Kuruvilla, will be leading the presentations at Campaign Hubs.
Each state will have 15 key engineering colleges as the campaign hubs where the SV team will directly interact with students to share the details of the six-month course to build a startup while in college. Students from all the remaining colleges, which are spokes, can go to the nearest campaign hub.
CET, Trivandrum is the nodal campaign hub and it will co-ordinate with students across the state in other colleges for implementation of the programme.
Shailendra Soman, a Final Year Student of Industrial Engineering, and a core group of students from CET Entrepreneurship Development Club (CET-EDC), have created the model. Online sessions will also be conducted where students can clarify doubts. In addition, they can shoot questions to leading startup founders who will answer then online in Facebook.
“Our interactions with students will be shot in videos. During this month itself, there will be a video that covers 25 top colleges across the six states to be covered in the Phase 1. A year down the line, we plan to have a video featuring top 50 college in the country covered with the campaign that ends in Silicon Valley,” Vijayakumar said.
After its roll out from CET, Trivandrum, the campaign will travel to 15 other top engineering colleges in the state. These are Thangal Kunju Musaliar College of Engineering, Kollam; Amal Jyothi College of Engineering and Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology (both in Kottayam), Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT), Kochi; Federal Institute of Science and Technology (FISAT), Angamaly in Ernakulam; Muthoot Institute of Technology and Science (MITS), Ernakulam; Toc H of Science and Technology, Kochi; Government Engineering College, Thrissur; NIT Calicut; Model Engineering College, Edaapally, Kochi; Rajagiri School of Engineering and Technology, Kakkanad, Kochi; Mar Athanasius College of Engineering, Ernakulam; and NSS College of Engineering, Palakkad. The final destination of the campaign is Government Engineering College, Thalassery in Kannur district.