Atal Innovation Mission
- The NITI Aayog’s flagship initiative, the Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), was launched in 2016 to promote innovation and entrepreneurship across the country.
AIM’s objective:
- To develop new programmes and policies for fostering innovation in different sectors of the economy.
- To provide platforms and collaboration opportunities for different stakeholders.
- To create an umbrella structure to oversee the innovation & entrepreneurship ecosystem of the country.
Atal Community Innovation Centres (ACIC)
- The Atal Community Innovation Centres (ACIC) are intended to serve the unserved/underserved areas of the country.
- ACIC believed it was critical to reach the bottom of the pyramid innovators and provide them with equal opportunities, particularly by reducing lab-to-land distance and creating a space for pre-incubation of ideas/solutions.
Significance of ACIC: Grassroots Innovations
- Grassroots Innovations (GI) are products and services that are the result of innovations created by people at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP), who are from economically disadvantaged and socially excluded areas.
- The primary goal of the ACIC is to nurture ideas that benefit society and the nation and to assist in their transformation into commercially successful products, with a particular emphasis on the Ideation to Prototype/MVP Development stages of the Innovation Cycle.