Innovation and Incubation Centre for Entrepreneurship (IICE), IISER Bhopal

Before you apply

• Check your idea against IICE's five thrust areas first. They are healthcare and bioengineering, environment and agriculture, internet of things and artificial intelligence, social and rural development technologies, and computational sciences and information technology. A proposal outside these has nowhere to land.
• If you are not from IISER Bhopal, your single biggest task is finding an IISER Bhopal faculty member willing to back you as mentor or collaborator. IICE requires that support for every outside applicant and for applicants from partner universities. Approach the relevant department before you write anything.
• Be ready to explain the technology, not just the market. IICE is the incubator of a science research institute and its evaluation committee is nine faculty members, so the technical case is what will get read closely.

What the application needs

• A business plan.
• Details of the intellectual property or technology the company will be founded on. If that technology came out of IISER Bhopal, attach the filed or granted patent application.
• IICE publishes an application form and a business proposal format on its apply page — use its format rather than your own.

How to apply

• There is no intake window and no deadline. Applications appear to be accepted on a rolling basis.
• Download the application form and the business proposal guidelines from the apply page, then submit through the apply link on that page.
• The apply link currently leads to a form that has not been filled out with its real questions. If it looks incomplete when you get there, email iice@iiserb.ac.in or office_iice@iiserb.ac.in and ask how to send your proposal, rather than submitting a blank response.

What to check with them first

• Whether incubation is charged and whether IICE takes any stake. Its incubation policy is published only as a scanned document, so neither is readable online.
• How long an incubation term runs, and what happens at the end of it.
• What access you get to the institute's Central Instrumentation Facility, and on what terms — that equipment belongs to IISER Bhopal, not to IICE.

Other ways in

• If you are an IISER Bhopal student, the Innovation Club is the lighter-touch route. It runs workshops, meet-ups and hands-on training and feeds students towards startup competitions.
• IICE runs open events — conclaves, outreach sessions and training weeks — several times a year. Its past events page is the honest guide to what it actually does; the upcoming events page is usually empty.

The Innovation and Incubation Centre for Entrepreneurship, usually written IICE, is the technology business incubator of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal. It sits on the second floor of the institute's main building on the Bhauri campus, on Bhopal Bypass Road, in about 10,000 square feet of built-up space that IISER Bhopal allocated to it. IICE was set up with support from the National Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board of the Department of Science and Technology, under the NIDHI-TBI scheme.

How incubation works

IICE runs one continuous incubation offer rather than dated cohorts. There is no batch number, no intake window and no deadline anywhere on its site, so a founder applies when ready. You submit a formal application for admission to the incubator together with a detailed proposal. The proposal has two required parts: a business plan, and the details of the intellectual property or technology the proposed company will be built on. If that technology was developed at IISER Bhopal, a copy of the filed or granted patent application has to be attached. IICE publishes an application form, a business proposal format and its incubation policy manual for download on its apply page.

The proposal has to sit in one of five thrust areas. They are healthcare and bioengineering; environment and agriculture; the internet of things and artificial intelligence; social and rural development and related technologies; and computational sciences and information technology. The same five areas are listed against IICE in the Department of Science and Technology's own published list of technology business incubators, so they are worth reading as a real filter rather than a wish list.

A Technical Evaluation Committee of nine IISER Bhopal faculty members exists to assess proposals, coordinated by Prof. Deepak Chopra. IICE does not describe the steps between submission and admission, and does not say who takes the final decision or how long it takes.

Who can apply

Four groups are named. Current and past faculty members of IISER Bhopal. Students and alumni of IISER Bhopal. Universities that IISER Bhopal partners with, where an R&D collaboration is already in place. And any startup from outside IISER Bhopal.

The last two carry a condition that matters more than anything else on this page: the application must be supported by an IISER Bhopal faculty member acting as a mentor or collaborator. So IICE is genuinely open to outside founders — it says so twice, and it says its goal is to promote entrepreneurship on campus and in its vicinity — but an outside founder cannot apply cold. Finding a faculty sponsor in the relevant department is the real first step, and it is worth doing before you fill anything in.

IICE does not state whether incubation is free or charged, whether it takes equity, or how long a residency lasts. The policy manual that would answer those questions is published as a scanned document that cannot be read as text. Ask before you commit.

Facilities

IICE lists office space, an innovation lab, common office equipment and high-speed internet, plus meeting and conference space. It describes what an incubatee gets as co-working space with office and research labs. Beyond its own floor, incubatees are pointed at a common instrument facility — IISER Bhopal's Central Instrumentation Facility, which runs nuclear magnetic resonance, mass spectrometry, X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy, and which visiting groups are shown as part of the incubation tour. Campus amenities listed alongside these are a cafeteria, the central library and a visitor hostel. Note that the instrument facility and the campus amenities belong to the institute, not to the incubator; IICE gives access to them.

On the support side IICE names mentoring, help with intellectual property and marketing, help with establishing the business and its collateral, and technical, legal and financial help. Technology transfer and protection of intellectual property are among its stated functions.

Scale

Fourteen incubated companies are named on the IICE startups page: Plabeltech, Intisen Technology, Adit Bioscience, Powernet Technology, Richnex Skinscience Laboratory, Konarq Technologies, Protomate AI, SimDaas Autonomy, Miniguru T-Labs, Beyond Limit Devices, Xtalsphere, Luminojen, MBiosys and Cytoforge Therapeutics. That list is the only measure of scale IICE publishes. It reports no startup count, no jobs figure, no capital figure and no founding year.

Who runs it

Dr. Bharathwaj Sathyamoorthy is the Coordinator and Dr. Sandeep Raut the CEO. Dr. Preeti Chandurkar is named as Deputy CEO in IICE's 2026 event reports, Mr. Aman Sinha as Project Incubation Manager, and Ms. Anjali Maran as Project Office Associate. Above them sit four committees — a Managing Committee chaired by Prof. Gobardhan Das as President, an Executive Committee, the Technical Evaluation Committee and a Management Advisory Committee — all drawn from IISER Bhopal faculty and administration. The committee pages have not all been kept current, so treat the roles on them as indicative.

Events and activity

IICE is visibly active. It co-organised the Industry–Academia Conclave 2.0 at IISER Bhopal in August 2026 with the institute's Dean of Research and Development, with speakers from IITM Pravartak, Zydus, IIT Bombay, HDFC Bank, Lupin, BHEL and the MP Startup Centre, and a startup exhibition alongside. In May 2026 it hosted two exposure programmes under the MSME RAMP scheme for incubation centres from across Madhya Pradesh. In February 2026 it ran a one-week advanced entrepreneurship and skill development programme on data science, sponsored by the MSME ministry's ESDP division and run with the institute's electrical engineering and computer science department. Earlier sessions include a talk on building a sustainable incubation ecosystem and an outreach session on the BIRAC BIG call run with FITT at IIT Delhi. A BIRAC EDGE scheme was announced at the August 2026 conclave, but IICE's page for it has no details yet.

IICE also runs an Innovation Club for IISER Bhopal students, which organises workshops, meet-ups and hands-on training and connects students to research conclaves and startup competitions. That one is for students of the institute, not for outside founders.

Location and contact

IICE is at the second floor of the main building, IISER Bhopal, Bhauri, Bhopal Bypass Road, Bhopal 462066, Madhya Pradesh. General and incubation queries go to its office inbox or its landline. The centre has a careers page, though no openings were listed on it when we checked.