BITS Pilani, Dubai: Building Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystem

Honoured with a stellar 5-star rating by the KHDA Higher Education Classification system, in partnership with QS, in four core categories of research, teaching, employability and internationalisation, BITS Pilani is extensively fostering a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Over the period of time, the university has built an ecosystem conducive to successfully lead early stage start-ups by its well-rounded team of students coming from various disciplines of engineering. Through its structured system, the students are also mentored and empowered with cross domain expertise.

BITS Pilani, Dubai Campus (BPDC) has set up an Innovation laboratory with high-end equipment with 24/7 working opportunities and Incubation facilities for the students and faculty to work on innovative ideas, business plans and transform their ideas into working prototypes. The Center for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) at the campus encourages students to think out of the box and guides, mentors them through the path of ideation to startups.

Courses such as entrepreneurship, new venture creation, business communication, etc. offered under the engineering programme help the budding entrepreneurs in developing business ideas. BITS through its alumni network connects the students with successful alumni-entrepreneurs as mentors, who guide the students in understanding the market preposition of their idea to develop the business model.  

Several inter-university and intra-university competitions are organised to promote the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship, and cash prizes awarded as seed fund.  Some students have used these opportunities as a springboard towards entrepreneurship as they receive sponsorship to fund some of the projects. A research showcasing evening is also organised, where students pitch their ideas to the invited alumni and industry personnel for sponsorship.

The diversity of knowledge, skills, experience and guidance by the faculty has helped the students to think ahead of time and come up with innovative products and business concepts. Following are a few successful start-ups:

Oblizer: A smart lightweight and portable UV Steriliser. It utilises the power of UV-C radiation and doesn't use any acids, liquids or bleaches for cleaning, thus leaving zero strains on the surface its being applied to. It is the best way to sterilise electronics and items which aren't liquid resistant.

SolarGridX: A crowd-investing platform that lets people invest in solar panels and earn returns from consumers who use their funding to put up solar panels.

Wrappup: A voice recorder that helps you highlight what's important and summarise your meetings. It processes speech and creates playable summaries of your discussions for you using a combination of NLP, AI, and machine learning.

Autochain: AI-based health insurance that uses Artificial Intelligence Underwriting engines that helps in reducing time, increasing buyer's ability to customise, driving down costs for insurer, controlling costs for insurance seeker, thus creating a win-win situation for all entities involved.

Whizkey: A multinational company specialised in creating game-changing Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain solutions. They create transformative results for challenging and not-thought-of problems of the future.

Today, BITS Pilani, Dubai has more than 20 start-ups to its credit and is proud of all its students who have garnered the courage to successfully innovate, lead and achieve such ideas that are at the forefront of science and technological developments today.