On the sidelines of Nasscom Product Council and IT consulting major Accenture’s recent visit to Israel to form a pact with Israel Innovation Authority, the former plans to start an education initiative with Tel Aviv University, identify one accelerator partner and partner with OurCrowd and Jerusalem Venture Partners.
On a phone call from Tel Aviv, Somdutta Singh, Nasscom product council’s co-chair says, “It’s fitting to start with Israel, the nation known for its deep technology innovations. Since 1980, more than 250 Israeli companies have gone public on Nasdaq stock market; the most represented country after USA and China.”
Nasscom had earlier predicted greater collaboration between Indian and Israeli startups can lead to an investment of $25 billion in the two countries’ startup ecosystem and create 25 products with a revenue of $1 billion each by 2025.
The product council is working towards skill development and plans to work with Tel Aviv University to bring some of their learnings to India. “Nasscom will directly tie-up with the universities for a joint curriculum available to Indian subscribers through a web platform.” Moreover, Nasscom’s product council will have an ongoing delegation of students and business professionals taken to Israel for a short-term course followed by a certification.
Apart from education, there are plans to take Indian startups to accelerators in Israel. “Besides Microsoft Accelerator, India does not have good accelerators. In Israel, we met MassChallenge, one of the largest accelerators to enable Indian companies to redefine their vision and go-to-market strategy.”
Moreover, there are plans to collaborate with Israel based equity crowdfunding platform like OurCrowd and Jerusalem Venture Partners.“While we are not a part of the Israel Innovation Fund that focuses on areas of water, agriculture and health; we will collaborate with other funds like which are already working on companies with domain expertise that share the same interests as the Product Council.”
But the product council at this stage has not been able to establish any such memorandum of association which enables them to classify companies which can be accelerated outside India.
Source: ET Tech
