Adi Shankara Institute of Engineering and Technology

Work out which door you are at

• A student of the college. The IEDC is your entry point, and the rule it publishes is simple: membership is open to all students of the college. Join first, then use everything else.
• Faculty or an alumnus. The TBI's objectives name students, faculty and alumni, so you are in scope — but there is no form to fill. Approach the incubation manager directly.
• A founder with no ASIET connection. There is no published intake for you. The one exception the site describes is the FabLab, which says it is open to external partners with permission. Ask before you plan around it, because no process for getting that permission is published.

How joining the IEDC works

• Fill in the membership form at the IEDC office on campus, or online through the centre's own site.
• The office is open Monday to Friday during the day, and on Saturdays for student project development.
• The "Join IEDC" button on the centre's site currently sends you to Kerala Startup Mission's statewide network instead of a campus form. That is a different thing — it enrols you in KSUM's network, not the college's centre. At the time of checking, that link also landed on a host whose security certificate was issued for another name, so your browser is likely to warn you. If you want campus membership, go to the office.

Getting into the incubation centre

• There is no intake, no eligibility list and no deadline published for the TBI. Treat it as a conversation, not an application.
• Start with the incubation manager for the Adi Shankara TBI, or the IEDC nodal officer. Both are named on the institute's pages, and both were the officers who received the LEAP card, so they are the people who handle this.
• Come with something buildable. The centre's stated focus is automation of traditional systems for rural communities, robotics and industrial IoT, rural technology, green technology, and AI and machine learning in healthcare — a proposal in one of those areas is easier to place.
• Its stages are described as pre-incubation, then incubation, then acceleration, so expect to be slotted by how far along the product is rather than by a cohort date.
• Register the company if you want the co-working space. The Business Hub is described as being used by students who have registered startups.

Know whose scheme you are applying to

• Most of the funding named on these pages is Kerala Startup Mission's, not the college's — the IDEA DAY grants, the performing-IEDC grant, the schemes reachable through the LEAP centre. Being at an IEDC gives you standing to apply; the application itself goes to KSUM.
• The same is true of the LEAP centre's co-working and programmes, which the college describes as provided by Kerala Startup Mission for registered Kerala startups.
• Register on Kerala Startup Mission's own channels in parallel. Nothing on the campus pages replaces that.

Before you cite anything from these pages

• The startup counts differ between the TBI page, a 2023 news post and the IEDC's own counter. Ask the incubation manager for the current number rather than quoting one.
• The institute's accreditation grades, rankings and placement figures belong to the college as a whole, not to the incubation centre. Do not carry them into a pitch as the incubator's track record.

Adi Shankara Institute of Engineering and Technology (ASIET) is a self-financing engineering college at Vidya Bharathi Nagar, Mattoor, Kalady, in Ernakulam district, Kerala, run under the Adi Sankara Trust. It carries a cluster of innovation units: an Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Centre (IEDC) set up by Kerala Startup Mission, a Technology Business Incubation Centre sanctioned by the Kerala State Industrial Development Corporation, a FabLab, an IPR Cell and an Institution's Innovation Council. All of them are campus units, and the one eligibility sentence either of the institute's sites publishes is a campus gate: "Membership is open to all students of the college."

Read the rest of this page in that light. If you are a founder with no connection to ASIET, there is no published intake here — no application form, no deadline, no incubation inbox. The FabLab, which says it is open to outside partners with permission, is the only opening the site describes, and it does not say how to ask. If you study or teach at ASIET, this is an established route from a class project to a registered startup, and a good deal of it runs through Kerala Startup Mission rather than through the college alone.

Who can apply

The IEDC states its own rule plainly: students join by filling in a membership form at the centre's office or online, and membership is open to all students of the college. The TBI's objectives are written for the same audience, naming students, faculty and alumni. The FabLab is the one unit whose page reaches wider — available to faculty and students across all technology disciplines, and to external partners with permission, permission being the operative word.

One thing to be careful about. The "Join IEDC" button on the centre's own site sends you off to Kerala Startup Mission's statewide IEDC network, which invites students, researchers, faculty and any interested individual to apply. That is joining KSUM's network across Kerala. It is not joining ASIET's centre, and the two should not be read as the same door.

The IEDC boot camp

Kerala Startup Mission inaugurated the centre on 10 February 2015, and the college calls it the Adi Shankara IEDC Boot Camp, or ABC. Its stated aim is to improve students' entrepreneurship and technical skills while producing things that could earn revenue. Through the year it runs innovation challenges, awareness camps, skill development programmes, design thinking workshops, patent support, hackathons, startup boot camps, product expos and sessions with mentors and investors. Recurring series named on its pages include the Adi Shankara Asianet News Young Scientist Award, the APJ Abdul Kalam Innovation Challenge run with KSUM, the Prayaana women's entrepreneurship workshops with 4Tune Factory, an Alumni Entrepreneurs Conclave, and an elevator pitch challenge that funds campus projects. The centre keeps a separate site for its executive committee, gallery and events; Nava, an eco-ideathon run with the Center for AI-IoT Innovation, is its named pitching competition.

Keep one thing straight about the money on the IEDC's achievements list: nearly all of it is Kerala Startup Mission's — the IDEA DAY grants to student projects, the grant that came with being listed a performing IEDC, the awards from KSUM summits. Those are KSUM schemes a student at an IEDC can reach, not a fund the college operates.

The Technology Business Incubation Centre

In 2019 the Kerala State Industrial Development Corporation sanctioned a Technology Business Incubation Centre at Adi Shankara. Alongside it the college describes a TBI Startup Boot Camp chapter supported by Startup Village, the college management and Kerala Startup Mission's Technopark TBI. Its focus areas are automation of traditional systems for rural communities, robotics and industrial IoT, rural technology, green technology, and AI and machine learning in healthcare. Its action plan moves an idea through three stages — pre-incubation over three to six months, incubation over six to twelve months, and acceleration over one to two years. The support listed next to that plan is grant support for initial product development, further scale-up, research and marketing grants released in parts, marketing help from branding through to product launch coverage and startup exhibitions, and savings on tools through the Amazon, Google Cloud and HubSpot startup programmes. What the page does not carry is a way in: no eligibility list, no form, no dates.

This is not a DST-recognised incubator, and the college does not say it is: checked against all five DST NIDHI registers, Adi Shankara appears in none. The two bodies named as supporters of the boot camp chapter, Technopark TBI and Startup Village, are themselves on the national list — that is their standing, not the college's.

Facilities

The FabLab is a digital fabrication lab of about 1,365 square feet, equipped for 3D printing, vinyl plotting, PCB milling, laser cutting and engraving, three-axis CNC milling, sand blasting, screen printing and electronic production. Its stated objectives are the widest brief any ASIET unit publishes: an entrepreneurial culture among students, faculty, alumni and external startups, a place for people without formal education to build prototypes, and support for small-scale industry and MSMEs. The IEDC separately keeps a pre-incubation co-working space it calls the Business Hub, about 1,435 square feet, used by students who have registered a startup. The two floor areas belong to two different rooms.

What the LEAP centre adds

In September 2023 Kerala Startup Mission sanctioned a LEAP centre — the Local Entrepreneurship Advancement Programme — at ASIET, with the card handed over at the IEDC Summit at CET Trivandrum; the college says it was one of five institutions in the state to receive one. Be precise about what that means for a founder. LEAP is described as a hub for registered Kerala startups, offering access to co-working spaces, schemes and programmes provided by Kerala Startup Mission. The provision is KSUM's; the campus is where it is hosted, and a startup that qualifies for a KSUM scheme applies to KSUM.

Scale

The counts the college publishes disagree with each other, so treat them as claims rather than figures. The TBI page says ten alumni startups are currently incubated and names ICube Design Studio, PenserLabs, RIOD Logic, Edith Industries and AIYGON, noting that two of them are women-led. A 2023 news post on the same site says the TBI was supporting and mentoring twelve campus startups in deep tech, clean tech, agritech, edutech and green tech, and that they had commercialised more than thirty products from the campus. A counter on the IEDC's own site claims thirty-three or more startups incubated. The IEDC page also gives two different counts of how many IEDCs exist in Kerala, two sentences apart.

Who runs it

Dr M S Murali is the Principal and heads the Institution's Innovation Council, which Dr Ajay Kumar convenes. Prof. Ajay Basil Varghese is the incubation manager for the Adi Shankara TBI, and Prof. Eldhose Sim is the nodal officer for the IEDC.

Location, events and careers

The campus is at Vidya Bharathi Nagar, Mattoor, Kalady 683574, in Ernakulam district. The IEDC office keeps hours Monday to Friday and opens on Saturdays for student project development. The institute lists staff openings on a careers page, and the IEDC site lists upcoming events.