SPEC-TBI — St. Peter's Engineering College Technology Business Incubator

Before you apply

• Check that your idea is genuinely technology-based. SPEC-TBI's rules define a technology-based company as one that commercialises science or technology innovations, employs a high share of technicians, engineers or scientists, or needs extensive research and development. A services or trading business will not fit.
• Refrigeration and cold chain is the incubator's declared thrust area, and it has the deepest equipment and the longest history there. If your work sits in that area, say so early — it is the strongest fit you can show. Other technology areas are accepted, so a hardware, manufacturing, IoT or life-sciences idea is still worth submitting.
• You do not need to be from the host college. The rules open incubation to any individual or group above 21 years of age. Do not rule yourself out as an outside founder.
• Decide the legal form. The rules expect the proposed venture to be a corporation, partnership or sole proprietorship, so think about which you will register before you write the application.

How applications work

• The incubator's own site carries three documents to read together: the incubatee application form, the rules and regulations, and the incubation process. Read the rules before filling the form — the eligibility and selection criteria are set out there, not on the web pages.
• Applications are described as online or offline. There is no dated window; the Admission Committee is described as meeting every month, so this reads as a rolling intake.
• Send the completed application, or ask which route is currently open, through info@spectbi.com or the project manager's office at the Avadi campus.

What reviewers look for

• A clear technology basis for the business, not just a market idea.
• A real need for what an incubator provides — space, labs, prototyping, mentoring. The rules ask applicants to demonstrate that need explicitly.
• Evidence that the business can be viable and can grow.
• A sound business plan. If yours is not finished, it is still worth applying: the rules allow provisional acceptance where the proposal looks promising on the face of it, with the full plan submitted afterwards for the Admission Committee to review.
• Expect to present. Shortlisted founders are invited to pitch their idea before an incubation agreement is signed.

Once you are in

• The seed support scheme is for incubatees only. It is explicitly not open to outside applicants — the incubator says the first step is to register as an incubatee and then apply for business incubation support. It covers product development, testing and trials, test marketing, mentoring, professional consultancy, patent registration and manpower, on the recommendation of the incubator's management committee.
• Ask what you get access to on campus. Beyond the workspaces, the incubator lists a makerspace, 3D printing, CNC milling, an IoT lab, a chromatography lab and an engine research lab, and it points startups at the host institute's research centres.

One thing to check first

• The incubator maintains two web presences and they are not equally current. The older standalone site still carries the application documents and contact details, but nothing dated on it is more recent than 2021, while the page on the host institute's site describes a larger, more recent operation. Before you build a plan around a place in this cohort, email or phone the project manager and confirm that intake is open and what the current terms are.

SPEC-TBI is the Technology Business Incubator on the St. Peter's campus at Avadi, Chennai. It was started in 2009 and is run by a society set up in collaboration with the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, on land and buildings provided by the host college. The host is St. Peter's Engineering College, Avadi — the engineering college of what was St. Peter's University and is today St. Peter's Institute of Higher Education and Research (SPIHER). It is not connected to the similarly named St. Peter's Engineering College in Hyderabad, and it is a different body from St. Peter's College of Engineering and Technology, which is also in Avadi.

The incubator's own account of itself is that St. Peter's Engineering College was the first engineering college in Chennai to get approval from the Department of Science and Technology to establish a TBI, and that the college management gave it roughly five thousand square feet of built-up space on campus. A representative of the Department of Science and Technology sits on its Board of Governors alongside a CII representative, an industry representative from Blue Star, two research and development experts and a venture capital expert.

What it works on

SPEC-TBI was set up around refrigeration and cold chain, and that is still its declared thrust area. Its stated vision is to preserve quality and improve shelf life, and its mission is eco-friendly, cost-effective solutions for the longevity of agricultural produce and industrial products using cold chain equipment. But the incubator says plainly that incubatees are not held to it: founders may pick other areas such as utility products and automobile accessories. Its current pages list a wider set of focus areas — smart and advanced manufacturing, life sciences, water and environment technologies, media and entertainment, electric vehicles, air conditioning and cold chain, refrigeration applications, and AI and Internet of Things applications.

Who can apply

This is the part founders most often get wrong about a college-hosted incubator. SPEC-TBI's published rules say any individual or group of individuals above 21 years of age is eligible to apply for incubation. There is no requirement to be a student, graduate or employee of the host college. The incubator also invites small and medium enterprises to use its product development facilities, and it says graduate students and industrialists located nearby can use the incubator for their own development.

The rules do set conditions on the venture rather than the person. The business activity proposed must be in a technology area, and the company must meet the incubator's definition of a technology-based company — one that pursues commercial applications of science or technology-based innovations, employs a high share of technicians, engineers or scientists, or needs extensive research and development to produce new products or services. The venture proposed must be a corporation, partnership or sole proprietorship. Applicants must show a need for incubator services, show they can build a viable and growing business, and submit a sound business plan. Where there is no proper business plan yet, the incubator says membership can be accepted provisionally if the proposal looks promising on the face of it.

How selection works

Applications go to an Admission Committee that the incubator says meets every month. The committee is chaired by the managing director of SPEC-TBI, with the chief executive as technical expert, the head of the MBA department as business expert, and the project manager as secretary; it can co-opt extra members to assess proposals in fields such as biotechnology. The incubator's current description of its process runs in seven steps: application and screening by an expert panel on innovation, feasibility and market potential; selection, a presentation and an incubation agreement; incubation support; capacity building through its training programmes; product development and validation; funding and investor connects through demo days and pitch events; and graduation with continuing alumni support once a startup reaches product-market fit or raises outside funding.

Facilities

The incubator lists individual and cubicle workspaces with more than forty seats in total, a fully air-conditioned training hall seating over three hundred, and a conference room seating over thirty-five. On the build side it lists an advanced manufacturing space with DLP and FDM 3D printers, post-processing and design workstations; a makerspace with electronic, mechanical and carpentry workstations, a pedestal grinder, a portable welding kit, a laser cutting and engraving unit and hand and power tools; a CNC milling machine; and a fabrication laboratory for building prototypes. There is a dedicated IoT lab, a chromatography lab for analytical and preparative separations, and an engine research laboratory with room for ten or more startups, holding a CRDI setup, a Kirloskar engine, a nano car engine, an AVL analyser and smoke meter, transesterification equipment and endoscope instrumentation. A startup library carries material on marketing, finance, legal and operations. Two research centres it lists — the Centre for Excellence in Peptidomics and Molecular Simulation and the Centre of Excellence for Algal Research — belong to the host institute rather than to the incubator.

Programmes and training

Beyond incubation, SPEC-TBI has long run short training programmes: Entrepreneurship Awareness Camps, Faculty Development Programmes on entrepreneurship for teaching staff, and Technology Based Entrepreneurship Development Programmes on servicing refrigeration and air-conditioning equipment for diploma and degree holders. These ran repeatedly from 2009 through 2021, the last listed editions being a two-week online faculty programme in February and March 2021 and a six-week online development programme from March to April 2021. No edition has been announced since.

Who runs it, and where

The chief executive is Dr. L. Mahesh Kumar, with Mr. R. Jayaraj Pandian as head of incubation and Dr. K. Gurusami as project manager. The chairperson is Dr. T. Banumathi, chancellor of St. Peter's University. The incubator is at the Technology Business Incubator, St. Peter's Engineering College, Avadi, Chennai 600054, Tamil Nadu, and general enquiries go to info@spectbi.com.