From Lab Research to Startup Innovation: Building a Founder Culture inside the School of CS and IT

A campus can teach coding; but we teach conviction: the ability to look at a messy, real-world problem, translate it into a system, and carry it all the way to adoption. That is where research stops being academic theatre and becomes innovation, and where student talent stops being potential and becomes enterprise.

In our School, entrepreneurship is not treated as an occasional celebration. It is treated as a career track with a method, mentors, money, and measurable outcomes. The objective is straightforward: students should graduate not only with a résumé, but with proof of capability: products deployed, users served, and in many cases, revenue earned.

The starting point of this journey is a signature session that has become a cultural reset for aspiring founders: Art of Falling in Love with Problems. The title is intentional. It trains students to become problem hunters before they become solution builders. They learn how to observe workflows, interview stakeholders, identify the real bottleneck behind the visible symptom, and write a problem statement that can be tested. Students are taught to ask the kinds of questions that strong founders ask early: Who is suffering? What is the cost of the problem? What happens if nothing changes? What does success look like in measurable terms? This single habit- problem obsession, dramatically changes the quality of ideas that enter our ecosystem.

From there, students progress into our Entrepreneurship Career Track, which is designed like a founder’s gymnasium. Startup founders and business leaders do not come only to speak; they come to coach. Teams are pushed to validate assumptions, narrow their first user segment, build a minimum lovable product, and learn the discipline of weekly execution. They are trained on practical founder skills: customer discovery, product-market fit thinking, pricing logic, go-to-market sequencing, pitch clarity, and stakeholder communication. The track does not reward hype. It rewards evidence.

What makes this ecosystem real is that the School backs it with resources. We have dedicated funds to enable student founders with training, company incorporation support, and early operational requirements. This is a decisive signal to students: if you are serious about building, the institution will create runway. At the same time, it creates seriousness on the founder side as well. Support is tied to progress, validated learning, shipped features, user feedback, and steady iteration.

The results are already visible. In the last academic year, eleven student companies were incubated in our School’s ecosystem. Five of them earned their first ₹1 lakh-plus revenue; one crossed ₹5 Lakh+ in just 6 months of inception. This is not a vanity milestone. Revenue is the purest form of validation because it forces clarity: the customer saw value, trusted delivery, and paid.

One major stream is academic operations innovation, where students build solutions that solve high-frequency institutional pain points. Our Smart Attendance System, a student’s project, is designed for real classrooms and real governance needs: accuracy, proxy prevention, exception handling, reporting dashboards, administrative overrides, and privacy-conscious data handling. Another project, Time Table Management System addresses scheduling at scale through constraint-driven logic: faculty availability, lab and room capacity, course combinations, section conflicts, and workload balancing, reducing the chaos of repeated timetable revisions.

Our Women Safety App is built for the moment that matters: under stress, with minimal interaction, and often with weak connectivity. It focuses on emergency alerting, live location sharing, escalation workflows, and privacy protections. Students learn that building for safety is not simply building features. It is designing reliability, empathy, and ethical safeguards into the system.

Another stream is responsible AI for high-stakes workflows. Our AI Proctoring Solution for examination administration is approached with seriousness because it touches fairness and student rights. Students design systems with transparent thresholds, event logging, auditable flags, and human review workflows. They learn that an AI system must be defensible, not just impressive.

Another project is experience-led automation, where small systems create outsized human impact. One such solution triggers a congratulatory communication to parents when a student gets placed. A call or message that turns placement into a shared family milestone. Behind the simplicity is solid engineering: placement data integration, consent-led communication flows, templated messaging, secure logs, and delivery reliability. It is a lesson in product thinking: delight, when engineered well, becomes trust.

These are not isolated classroom exercises. They are outcomes of an approach where students are mentored to do quality research that yields product outcomes. Students learn how to review prior work responsibly, define evaluation protocols, document results with integrity, and translate the research into deployable systems. In other words, the lab is not a place where work ends. It is a place where work becomes credible enough to ship.

Execution discipline is the invisible architecture behind all of this. Teams operate in cycles: define the problem, validate it with stakeholders, build the smallest usable version, test it in realistic conditions, measure outcomes, and iterate. Mentors evaluate progress through evidence: user feedback, adoption signals, reliability improvements, and clarity of next milestones. This is how students stop thinking like “project teams” and start acting like “product teams.”

The larger call is clear. When a School trains students to fall in love with problems, equips them to build with rigour, and gives them runway to incorporate and sell, entrepreneurship stops being an exception. It becomes a culture.

Eleven incubated ventures and five early revenue earners are outcomes we can count. But the more important outcome is what a new learners feel, the moment they interact with our ecosystem: a School where students are learning to build things that survive outside the campus gates; and a School where lab research is no longer the finish line, but the foundation for startup innovation.