Indian Institute of Technology Madras launched a ‘Centre for Research on Start-Ups and Risk Financing’ (CREST) to provide academic and thought leadership in innovation, entrepreneurship and risk capital.

It would also create a data repository on Indian start-ups and ventures to address a major hurdle for engaging in high-quality research. This information resource would be made accessible for researchers and policymakers that can result in top-tier publications.

Delivering the Inaugural Keynote Lecture of CREST on Tuesday Prof Tarun Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, Harvard Business School, said, “There is a need to build trust between scientists and business leaders. Amazing technology is coming out of the labs but the condition to get the maximum out of such innovations is not there.”

The vision of CREST include being globally recognised as a leading centre of research engaged in scholarly research in the areas of creation, development, and financing of innovation, start-ups, and entrepreneurship

It also aims to achieve cross country collaborative research, resulting in the use of unique data sets on start-ups and venture capital that increases the chances of breakthrough findings. Evidence synthesis on the start-up and innovation ecosystem to inform policymakers and practitioners.

Delivering the presidential remarks of the event, Prof Bhaskar Ramamurthi, director, IIT Madras, said, “These research initiatives we (IIT Madras) are creating, almost all of them, have very strong international collaborative connections. We are knitting together partnerships with leading groups across the world. We want to have a strong flow of people and ideas. We will have the interactions in online mode till the pandemic gets over.”

The key mission of CREST would be to engage in scholarly research encompassing the areas of innovation, entrepreneurship, and risk capital. The data repository being developed on innovation, venturing and risk capital will create the infrastructure to carry out high-quality research. The creation of entrepreneurship-specific language models will facilitate a better understanding of the entities in the ecosystem while facilitating the use of the latest research in AI, ML to generate new insights.

The current projects and studies of CREST include a book project on shifting orbits and research studies on the role and effect of corporate venture capital investments among others.