What handholding do our startups expect from the govt.

HI MOHUA, Thanks for starting this thread. I am of the opinion that there are two types of innovations. One that is incremental and other that is completely novel. The government has a sharp focus on the novelty aspect and it reflects in the national strategies (E.g. BIRAC BIG grants). Higher the novelty the better for Intellectual property. However, for innovation environment to sustain and flourish (especially biotech), one needs to bell the cat of doing the groundwork, e.g., making reagents, that almost anyone can make if they have the infrastructure, technical know-how. Here the true hurdle is ironically intellectual property itself. Since a huge proportion of Biotech R&D IP is not filed in India, if we want to become self-sustained and support a parallel ecosystem of novel innovations, we need to provide IP assistance to MSMEs. There are a lot of expired patents and it actually takes good R&D people to swift through and provides a list of relevant IPs to work on incrementally to make a better product. If there is a forum that can help provide this or guide MSME, my belief is that it will change the way we look at becoming self-sustained.