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.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of Private Equity (PE) financing in the infrastructure and real estate sectors. In doing so, it analyzes the effects of such investments in the two sectors, evaluates the types of financing strategies, and explores the value created by such investments. Infrastructure and Real Estate have emerged as a significant asset class for PE investors. In the last three decades, PE firms have invested significant amounts of capital in infrastructure and real estate – sectors which did not feature in their radar until recently. Between 2000 and 2009, PE firms invested about USD 203 billion in infrastructure and similarly placed figures in real estate. Fundraising for infrastructure and real estate was about USD 98 billion and USD 151 billion in 2019, setting new records and reaching all-time highs. This book examines such PE investments – both at a global level and at an emerging economy level, to identify how PE firms have created an impact with their investments, to provide both ready capital and value-addition to sectors which seem to urgently need both. The book is being published by Springer.

Three critical aspects of venture capital investments are valuation, security selection, structuring, and exit. Valuing a new venture with limited information is always difficult. The process of valuing a venture and writing contracts between VC and Entrepreneur is an intensive process. Since India receives a significant pile of capital inflows, tax implications in VC investments need be considered. The VC hopes to design a contract that reflects the firm's true value, protect investments on the downside, and reflects all of this in the exit returns. It's fascinating to learn about start-up valuation and the signals that VCs consider before investing. The information asymmetry in venture capital investments has been extensively explored. Securities and the capital structure enable entrepreneurs and investors to optimise their incentives. Contracts, in particular, mitigate downside risk for investors. Given the tax implications, security selection and structuring is a critical component of venture capital investing. These risk mitigation strategies should reflect in the returns when they exit from the venture.

Many universities have a technology based incubator (TBI) or its variants such as innovation and technology centres, science and technology parks, and business accelerators. TBIs offer a link between: technology, know-how, entrepreneurial talent, and capital. They help nascent ventures with various support services, such as business services, networking, access to professional services & capital. In short, incubators enable nascent enterprises to overcome their liabilities of newness and smallness. The intent is to help the ventures by providing enabling linkages to help the new business survive, scale up and grow. These university-based incubators have now become a hub for new business ideas and several well-known firms have come out of such incubators. It has also been seen that there is no clear single path for success of a new venture. Every entrepreneur has access or utilizes a different set of resources which can lead to a successful idea. In this backdrop, incubators need to understand and back ideas which have a high chance of success. This should be done while optimization the use of incubator resources.

Organizations continuously focus on fostering radical innovation to gain a competitive advantage. Innovation theory shows that recombining the existing components yields most of the invention. The fourth industrial revolution provides numerous opportunities to manufacturing firms by integrating various digital technologies such as additive manufacturing, IoT, machine intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, and blockchain. Most of the studies illustrated the operational benefits of digital technologies. This proposed study focuses on how these technologies affect the firm's innovative capabilities using patent analytics.

Entrepreneurship helps women to realize their potential and fulfill their dreams by providing them earning opportunities, improving the standard of living of their family which ultimately has implications for society. Women entrepreneurs are increasingly contributing to the economic growth of the nation worldwide, still their representation in entrepreneurship is meagre in India. Government of India (GOI) has taken enormous efforts towards women empowerment and entrepreneurial development by introducing several schemes under the Ministry of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). Yet many such sponsored development activities have failed to reach all sections of women. While such schemes and support from institutions have given women much-needed economic empowerment, it is largely observed that women entrepreneurs have to confront several personal, familial, societal, and cultural obstacles. So, there is a constant need to investigate the reasons (drivers) for the under-representation of women in the entrepreneurship domain which is one of the objectives of our research and identify the factors that contribute to their business performance. This study also seeks to explore the work-life balance of women.