A confluence of factors has resulted in India becoming one of the key centres globally for start-ups and innovation. Innovation, venturing, and entrepreneurship is getting increasing attention from policy makers. These three areas of economic activity are expected to play a key role in the economic growth of the country apart from strengthening India’s position as an innovation country. Because of these, there has been a fillip to the start-up activity in the country. Formulation of start-up policies, setting up of incubation centres, growth in investments, and focus on entrepreneurship in academic curricula, have led to an increase in the number of start-ups. However, growth of ventures and entrepreneurship in India so far has been predominantly led by policy and practice.

A look at the investment in Indian ventures helps to put things in perspective. For the 10-year period, 2011-20, the risk capital investment in Indian technology start-ups has been about $68 billion, which approximately translates to ₹476,000 crores. Academic research and thinking can play an important role in sustaining and furthering this growth in entrepreneurship. Insights and evidence from academic research would support policy making as well as increase the effectiveness of managerial and investment decision making in entrepreneurship. The objective of the CREST is to augment academic and thought leadership in innovation, entrepreneurship and risk capital.

To be globally recognized as a leading centre of research engaged in

• Scholarly research in the areas of creation, development, and financing of innovation, start-ups, and entrepreneurship
• Creation of a world class unique data repository on Indian start-ups and ventures that seeks to address the major hurdle for engaging in high quality research. This database would be made accessible for researchers and policy makers that can result in top tier publications
• Cross country collaborative research, resulting in the use of unique data sets on start-ups and venture capital that increases the chances of break through findings
• Evidence synthesis on the start-up and innovation ecosystem to inform policy makers and practitioners

• Scholarly research encompassing the areas innovation, entrepreneurship, and risk capital: Uncover new ground leading to publications in top tier journals. Faculty members along with their collaborators will pursue bespoke based on their research interests and the thrust areas of the centre
• Develop a data repository on innovation, venturing and risk capital: To address the fundamental challenge of data non-availability in this sector and create the infrastructure to do high quality research. Creation of entrepreneurship specific language models will facilitate better understanding of the entities in the ecosystem, while facilitating use of latest research in AI, ML to generate new insights
• Evidence synthesis: Use of evidence to guide policy making is emerging as an important imperative. CREST would synthesize existing evidence as well as generate new evidence based on unique data sets from organizations in the start-up ecosystem such as incubators, investor networks, government missions, and so on. Such grounded research can help to generate novel findings, which can be published in high impact journals
• Knowledge dissemination and continuous engagement with stakeholders in the innovation and start-up ecosystem: Interface of scholarly and rigorous research with policy and practice has been very minimal. By actively engaging with various stakeholders the centre would be well positioned to impact policy and practice