The Tamil Nadu State Planning Commission has proposed a comprehensive study to document the opportunities and challenges within the state's start-up ecosystem. The study aims to achieve multiple objectives. These include analysing the growth and potential opportunities for start-ups, identifying gaps in existing government initiatives, addressing challenges related to sustainability and scalability, promoting social inclusion, exploring the role of public procurement in driving economic growth, and ultimately contributing to Tamil Nadu's goal of becoming a trillion-dollar economy. Additionally, the study seeks to map best practices both within and outside the state to develop appropriate policy interventions. The research will employ a mixed-methods approach, leveraging primary and secondary data sources to provide comprehensive insights. An extensive secondary data review will be conducted to explore policies related to the Tamil Nadu start-up ecosystem and available opportunities. Data will be gathered from diverse sources, including the IIT Madras-YNOS Platform, StartupTN, academic journals, research reports, publications, and government documents. To gather nuanced insights, the study will conduct 500 face-to-face structured interviews with start-ups, focusing on understanding the challenges they face, the opportunities they identify, and the effectiveness of existing policies.

This report provides a snapshot of the start-up ecosystem in the state and was compiled using data from various secondary and primary sources. The secondary data was obtained from various policies and initiatives, articles, and websites that provide relevant information on the start-up ecosystem. StartupTN initiatives and relevant sector-specific policies have been studied in detail to understand their engagement with critical areas of support imperative for the success of a start-up. They include areas such as formation support, fiscal, regulatory, human capital, ease of doing business and so on. The exercise provides a comprehensive perspective of the state-initiated start-up schemes aligning with the mission of StartupIndia, as well as schemes targeting select industries with the intention to boost the relevant start-ups to meet national and global expectations. The analysis of the schemes launched between 2018 to 2022 was done extensively as they form the core of the StartupTN initiative. The main data for this research was obtained from two sources, namely YNOS Venture Engine and StartupTN for data on the start-up landscape, funding, revenue and asset generation. Furthermore, data related to employees was collected from start-ups through an online survey.

The Startup India initiative is envisioned to catalyse the start-up culture, with start-ups being recognized through the initiative and entrepreneurs availing the benefits of launching and conducting their own business in India with ease. In recent years, India has seen a steady increase in the number of start-ups incorporated, especially in sectors such as IT and ITES. The annual growth rate of start-ups as of early 2022 was around 15.5 percent. The number of registered start-ups grew from 223 in August 2016 to more than 83000 in December 2022. Several policy changes and new schemes have been introduced by 129 different ministries, to encourage and support start-ups. Government’s support is critical in providing the essential funding, mentorship, and market access support required by start-ups. In line with the same, MEITY’s start-up support programs contain various provisions to incentivise key start-up stakeholders such as incubators and institutions of higher education among others so as to promote holistic development for India’s start-up ecosystem. The objective of this study is to analyse the start-up landscape and understand the impact of the Start-up policy introduced by the National Government in 2016, with a specific focus on start-ups in digital technologies.

A typical valuation procedure of a startup involves an analysis of potential future cash flows, an analysis of comparative firms’ stock prices, or an analysis of the price-to-earnings ratio of the venture. The valuation of a new venture with significant growth opportunities, high uncertainty and no real cashflow using foggy discount rate estimations seem to defy all the common wisdom on growth firm valuation. Rather than anchoring the Risk-Return equation of such high-growth, high-uncertainty firms in some impassable plan, the study intends to conduct an empirical analysis of the risk and return profile of start-ups in the Indian scenario using a risk-neutral model and backing it up with the findings of the cascade neural network model. This would provide a systematic reference guide for entrepreneurs as well as risk capital investors in India.

Health Equity is the absence of unfair, avoidable, or remediable differences among groups of people, whether those groups are defined socially, economically, demographically, or geographically or by other dimensions of inequality (e.g., sex, gender, ethnicity, disability, or sexual orientation). It also requires attention to health inequities, which are differences in population health status and mortality rates that are systemic, patterned, unjust, and actionable, as opposed to random or caused by those who become ill. Health equity is an issue within all our countries and is affected significantly by the global economic and political system. Startups have unique capabilities such as revenue generation, poverty elevation, and strengthening the local economy, etc. that can help them achieve health equity. This proposed research focuses on how these startups and entrepreneurship can contribute to health equity and address inequities in health.

Over the past decade, student entrepreneurship has seen a successful evolution. Many higher educational institutions have recognized this potential and are actively imparting entrepreneurship knowledge to their students. The resulting success of these student startups has motivated a growing number of young people to pursue entrepreneurial ventures. This research delves deeper, investigating the factors that influence the success of student startups beyond just access to resources. It examines how student entrepreneurs’ socio- economic backgrounds, venture-specific characteristics, and traditional factors like market fit and team dynamics contribute to the varying success rates of early-stage student startups.