CCIE — Centre for Commercialisation of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Centurion University

Check which body you are dealing with

Centurion has two units with near-identical names, and only one of them is the incubator. CCIE, the Centre for Commercialisation of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, is a wing of CSTEFC, the Section 8 company that holds the Startup Odisha recognition. The Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship is a university research centre whose stated job is incubating start-ups led by its own students and faculty. If you are an outside founder, CCIE is the one to approach. Older pages call the same incubator CIE or CIEC — that is a renaming, not a different organisation.

The apply form on the page does not work

The Apply section on the CCIE page looks like a working application form and is not one. Nothing you type in it is sent anywhere, and you get no error and no confirmation. Do not treat a submission there as an application, and do not wait for a reply to it.

CCIE publishes no email address and no phone number of its own, so there is no direct inbox to fall back on either. Your realistic options are the university's general contact channels, or the state route below.

The state route is the one with rules you can read

CSTEFC is on the Startup Odisha register of recognised incubators. If your startup is recognised under the Startup Odisha Initiative, you can apply online to the state for subsidised incubation at any recognised incubator and name this one. Getting your Startup Odisha recognition in place first is therefore the single most useful preparation step, because it turns a vague enquiry into an application the incubator has a reason to process.

That scheme has terms worth knowing before you commit. It runs for a maximum of one year, a recognised startup can use it only once, and you cannot sub-let or share the space while it runs. Once it is approved you sign a fresh rent agreement with the incubator and file it with the Startup Secretariat within a month.

Be clear about whether you need to be connected to the university

No page states an eligibility bar either way. CCIE says it accepts applications at any stage and in any sector, and says nothing at all about affiliation; the 2022 incubation report describes the centre as supporting the university's own students and faculty. Make this your first question in any conversation, before you discuss your idea. Ask directly whether they take founders with no link to Centurion, and what that changes about space, fees and mentoring.

What to have ready

The fields CCIE's own page asks for tell you the shape of what it wants: who you are, which state you are in, which sector you are in, and a short description of the problem you are solving and where you currently are in the journey. Write that description so it stands alone in a few sentences, because it may be all anyone reads before deciding whether to call you.

Beyond that, match your ask to what this incubator actually has. Its strengths are physical: subsidised workspace, 3D printing and scanning, a five-axis CNC machine, AR and VR labs, and coworking space for incubated companies. A hardware, agriculture, craft, textile or clean-energy team with something to build has a far easier case to make here than a software team looking mainly for capital.

Do not expect money from the incubator

CCIE describes introductions to angel investors, venture capital firms, financial institutions and government grant schemes. It does not describe a fund or a seed scheme of its own, and no cohort, intake window or deadline is published for anything. Space is described as subsidised rather than free, and advisory services are charged. Ask what incubation costs and whether any equity is taken — neither is stated anywhere, so you will have to get it in writing yourself.

How selection works

All the site says is that the team reviews an application and reaches out to discuss next steps. There is no published panel, no stages, no scoring criteria and no timeline. Assume an informal conversation rather than a structured cohort selection, and keep your own record of who you spoke to and when.

CCIE, the Centre for Commercialisation of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, is the incubator run out of Centurion University of Technology and Management. It is a wing of the Centurion Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Facilitation Centre, or CSTEFC, a Section 8 not-for-profit company incorporated in January 2012 and registered at the university's Paralakhemundi campus in Gajapati district, Odisha. The Government of Odisha's startup register lists CSTEFC as a recognised incubator of the Startup Odisha Initiative.

The same body has been called three things over the years, so it is easy to think there are several. The older pages on the university site call it CIE, the Center for Innovators and Entrepreneurs. A 2022 incubation report calls it CIEC, the Center for Innovators, Entrepreneurs and Commercializations. The current page calls it CCIE. All three describe the identical arrangement — a wing of CSTEFC under the university — so they are one body that has been renamed. Separately, the university also runs a research centre called the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, whose stated focus is incubating start-ups led by its own students and faculty. That is a different unit, and it is not CCIE.

What CCIE offers

The core of the offer is space and equipment. CCIE describes subsidised incubation space as plug-and-play workspace, with free cloud space for a limited period, and its pages say coworking space is provided to incubated companies. On the equipment side it names 3D printers and scanners for prototyping, a five-axis CNC machine, and AR and VR labs for designing and simulating a product. Around that sit mentoring, with different mentors named for different stages of a startup, structured alpha and beta testing to check product-market fit before scaling, and workshops on business and entrepreneurial skills.

CCIE also says it runs cohort-based accelerators and pitch competitions and makes introductions to angel investors, venture capital firms, financial institutions and government grant schemes. Those are introductions rather than money from CCIE itself — no fund or seed scheme of its own is described anywhere on its pages, and no accelerator is named, dated or given a page you can read. Advisory services are offered for a fee the site calls nominal, so incubation here is not uniformly free.

Who can apply

CCIE calls itself sector agnostic and says it welcomes applications from all sectors at any stage, from a concept to an early prototype to a business looking to scale. The seven sectors it names as examples are agriculture and allied fields, healthcare, education and skill development, alternate energy, waste management, art and craft, and fashion and retail.

What no page states is whether you have to be connected to the university. Nothing on the site says outside founders may apply, and nothing says they may not. The only document that scopes it at all is the 2022 incubation report, which describes the centre as supporting the university's own students and faculty, and whose three case studies are all student ventures. The list of companies the incubator names is mixed in the same way: a large part of it is the university's own production units, which share names and contact people with each other, alongside separately registered private limited companies with no visible university link. Treat an open intake as unconfirmed and ask before you plan around it.

There is one route that is clearly open to a founder from outside. Because CSTEFC is on the Startup Odisha register, a startup recognised under the Startup Odisha Initiative can apply online to the state for subsidised incubation at any recognised incubator and name this one. That scheme has published eligibility, it is capped at one year, and it can be used once per recognised startup. It is the state's route rather than CCIE's own, and it is the one with rules you can read in advance.

How to apply

This is the weakest part of the picture, and it is worth knowing before you spend an evening on it. The CCIE page carries an Apply section with fields for your name, email, phone, state, sector and a description of your idea, and a button reading Submit Application. That section does not work. There is no form behind it and nothing on the page that would send what you type anywhere, so pressing the button does nothing and shows no error. CCIE publishes no email address and no phone number of its own either, and the university's own contact page renders its addresses in a form a browser has to unscramble.

So if you want to reach this incubator, go through the Startup Odisha route, or through the university's general contact channels, and expect to have to chase. Do not assume an application submitted on the CCIE page has been received.

Scale

The incubator's own pages give three different counts of how many startups it has supported — one figure on the older research-centre page, a larger one in the 2022 report, and a longer table on the current entrepreneurship page — so no single number is reliable enough to quote. The company table itself mixes the university's own production units with independent companies, which is another reason not to read its length as a count of external startups. The Odisha register records the incubation floor area as 5,400 square feet.

The page's headline counters should also be read with care. A claim of more than three decades of history cannot describe CSTEFC, which was incorporated in 2012, and a claim of a team of more than two hundred sits on the same page as a member list of sixteen people, fifteen of whom are named as School of Management faculty and one as a project executive.

Who runs it

CCIE names Dr. Muktikanta Mishra, founder and chancellor of the university, and Dr. D N Rao, co-founder and vice president, at the top of its leadership list. Mr. Debasish Panda is named as chief executive officer of CCIE and chief financial officer of the university. Mr. Sanjeev Mishra is named as head of operations. The wider member list is largely School of Management faculty across the Bhubaneswar and Paralakhemundi campuses.

Where it is

The registered address of the incubating entity is Alluri Nagar, R. Sitapur, via Uppalada, Paralakhemundi 761211, in Gajapati district, southern Odisha. CCIE's own contact block gives its location more loosely as Centurion University, Bhubaneswar, which is where the university's corporate office sits. The university runs campuses at Paralakhemundi, Bhubaneswar, Balangir, Rayagada, Balasore and Chatrapur; only Paralakhemundi is the incubator's registered home. Careers at the university are advertised on its own careers page rather than by the incubator.