Under Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), the NITI Aayog successfully completed a two-month long  exclusive entrepreneurship ‘ATL Tinkerpreneur’ summer bootcamp held across the country.

Atal Innovation Mission

• AIM is a flagship initiative set up by NITI Aayog to promote innovation and entrepreneurship across the country.

• AIM is also envisaged as an umbrella innovation organisation that would play an instrumental role in alignment of innovation policies between central, state and sectoral innovation schemes.

• It promotes an ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship at various levels — higher secondary schools, science, engineering and higher academic institutions, and SME/MSME industry, corporate and NGO levels.

Major initiatives undertaken by AIM are:

• Establishment of Atal Tinkering Laboratories (ATLs) in schools to create a problem-solving mindset in students between classes 6–12.

• Establishment of Atal Incubation Centres (AICs) in universities, institutions, and the private sector to foster world-class startups, as well as adding new dimensions of outcome-based scale-up and monitoring of existing incubator models.

• Launch of Atal New India Challenges (ANICs) to foster product and service innovations in the country with national socio-economic impact and aligning them to the sectoral needs of various ministries/industry and with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

• Establishment of Atal Community Innovation Centres (ACICs) in the unserved/underserved regions of the country, including tier-2 and tier-3 cities and in the hinterland, to stimulate community-centric innovations and create local hubs of innovation and job creation.

• Launch of Applied Research and Innovation Challenges for Small Enterprises (ARISE) to stimulate Make in India research and innovations in the MSME industry.

• Establish a nationwide voluntary Mentors of Change network to support all the initiatives of AIM.

• Building strategic innovation partnerships with the public and private sectors and multinationals, and country-to-country partnerships to promote collaborations and cross-border innovation exchanges.

According to NITI Aayog, AIM’s initiatives have played an important role in the advancement of India from a position of 81 in the Global Innovation Index in 2015 to a position of 48 in 2020.

Highlights of ATL Tinkerpreneur programme:

• Under the Atal Innovation Mission, Atal Tinkering Laboratories (ATLs) have been set up in schools across the country with the objective of fostering curiosity, creativity, and imagination in young minds, and inculcating skills such as design mindset, computational thinking and adaptive learning. 

• ‘Tinkerpreneur’ – the name derived from the phrase ‘enabling students to tinker from the comfort of their homes and become an entrepreneur this summer’ was a bootcamp focussed on cultivating a hands-on innovative mindset among students.

• Designed for high school students across the nation, ‘ATL Tinkerpreneur’ saw over 9,0000 participants across 32 states/UTs and 298 districts.

• Spread across a span of 9 weeks from May 31, 2021, ‘ATL Tinkerpreneur’ enabled the participants to develop a business idea and create an end-to-end strategy for setting up a new venture. 

• Over the course of the bootcamp, the participants learnt the required digital skills, created and developed a business model around a digital product, generated a marketing plan, developed/established an online store, learnt business finance and culminated it by presenting their pitch deck in front of industry experts.

• Participants leveraged the knowledge and hands-on involvement of over 650 mentors, inculcated and applied their inputs and improved upon their ventures.

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