Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: The government also announced equity support of up to Rs 1 crore for commercialisation of ideas, designs and patents across all three sub-schemes and also to help MSMEs further scale up to raise subsequent funding.
Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: The MSME Ministry on Thursday launched the MSME Innovative Scheme with the combination of existing sub-schemes around incubation, design, and intellectual property rights (IPR) for MSMEs. The new scheme would act as a hub for innovation activities facilitating and guiding the development of ideas into viable business propositions that can benefit society directly and can be marketed successfully, the ministry said at the launch. However, the erstwhile three schemes of incubation, design and IPR will also continue to operate as individual programmes.
“Prime Minister Narendra Modi believes India can become atmanirbhar, create employment, boost entrepreneurship, adopt new technologies, enhance GDP and exports through MSMEs. We have announced the MSME Innnovative Scheme in that direction to support different MSME ideas. Our enterprises should also endeavour to achieve high growth in manufacturing the way businesses in countries like the US and China have achieved. This new scheme will ensure support through guidance, financial support, technical support, and more to MSMEs to scale up,” MSME Minister Narayan Rane said at the launch of the scheme.
The incubation part under the scheme would promote the adoption of the latest technologies among MSMEs that seek validation of their ideas at the proof-of-concept level. The ideas would be incubated at ‘eligible institutions’ recognised by the government to act as business incubators. The scheme would also have a provision of providing financial assistance of up to Rs 15 lakh per idea to these host institutes apart from up to Rs 1 crore support for procuring plant and machinery for MSMEs.
As part of the incubation scheme, the government also announced the launch of an MSME Idea Hackathon to invite ideas from MSMEs, innovators and students through host institutes from March 10 to March 24, 2022.
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Under the design component, the scheme would provide mentoring and financial assistance towards solving design-related problems for new product development as well as improvement in existing products. The partner institutions under the scheme are IISc Bangalore, IITs, National Institute of Technology, National Institute of Design, and others.
Micro enterprises would have access to 75 per cent of the total project cost while small and medium businesses would be provided with 60 per cent financing or up to a maximum of Rs 40 lakh per project. Students participating in the scheme would get the assistance of 75 per cent of the total project cost or up to a maximum of Rs 2.5 lakh.
The third component of the Innovative scheme, IPR would cater to measures related to the protection of MSME ideas and their commercialisation through advisory and consultation support. MSMEs would be eligible to get their cost incurred on registration of patent, trademark, geographical indications (GI), and design reimbursed. The maximum assistance would be Rs 5 lakh in case of a foreign patent, Rs 1 lakh for a domestic patent, Rs 2 lakh for GI registration, Rs 15,000 for design registration, and Rs 10,000 for trademark.
The government also announced equity support of up to Rs 1 crore for commercialisation of ideas, designs and patents across all three sub-schemes and also to help MSMEs further scale up to raise subsequent funding. For this, a separate corpus will be created and managed by SIDBI as the fund manager.
