The MIC-Lahore is more of an opportunity door that need a right key to open it | MIC-Lahore’s Startup incubation facility.

By Umar Farooq 

Dated: 17-Oct-2015

Email: hideurself_00@live.com

LAHORE___Nov 23, 2012___ Microsoft Corp. announced        to inaugurate first MIC, Microsoft Innovation Center, at Lahore, Pakistan, located in Arfa Technology Park. And Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working at MIC-Lahore, I have noticed that the center is equipped with the latest technology, tools and skilled staff to help drive job creation in Pakistan by incubating the entrepreneurs with their startups, refining their ideas, and providing full support to

       

entrepreneur’s and communities to increase the number of successful businesses and availability of highly skilled technology specialists,

Providing students with lot of different facilities, one of the best facilities that MIC-Lahore providing is with “Startup Incubation” Facility, also known as startup accelerator, hold significant importance in a country like Pakistan, to support innovations, where students and entrepreneurs are considered among one of the world’s most promising startup communities and MIC-Lahore is doing really well in this regard, helping/escorting them to make their ideas productive, we (me as an employee at MIC-Lahore) always have been focusing on uninitiated startups and giving them such a play stroke that can lead entrepreneurs to improve their efforts and making targets achievable.

MIC-Lahore provides an entrepreneur or a community, having unique startup idea regardless of the prior experience, with different support functions that enables them to get all the expert advices and technical guidance; they need to build and survive for a longer time, under her remarkable mentorship. The main idea behind all that is to facilitate transformation of high-potential software startups into successful businesses.   

MIC-Lahore only entertain/encourage those startups who are completely eligible. If external startups want to be a part of it (they can get recruited themselves according to the eligible criteria) then they have to be proactive in recruiting process and quit sincere and passionate about their profession. The eligible criteria can be viewed at http://www.pitb.gov.pk/mic_sip. After getting finalize through recruiting committee each startup is furthermore incubated for a specific period of time. During this interval incubates gets everything they need to make their dream come true. MIC-Lahore gives each startup time duration of 6 months so that their great ideas can be nurtured from their very source.

Students, entrepreneurs with their startups are offered with various perks like, giving machines, BizSpark, technical training and mentorship and whatever the tool they need to accomplish their needs. We provide cheap human resources through interns if they request for, we prefer those interns to be provided who have got their skills under our program of “Skill Enhancement/Acceleration” that is been happening since the day MIC-Lahore has started its services under highly qualified staff.  

We work closely on idea refinement, our MIC-Lahore team believes that great ideas can come from anyone at any time and the more we refine the simpler and clearer will be the product to those who use it. Each decision we make is made with our startup’s goals in mind. One thing I love about our team is how we work together. Before any pixels are pushed or any code is written, we sit down and make a plan for what needs to be done and how we’ll accomplish startup’s goal. This allows the startup team to focus on the product/service it is working on and get it to the market quickly. That collaborative working strategy empowers our team to continue enhancing the product every day.

We have product testing lab where almost all Microsoft products are available including phone, x box, Kinect, surface pro etc. once product is complete, we introduce them to the potential market and venture capitals.

As support to the startup MIC-Lahore make some facilities available to incubates that involves getting to work in a practicable environment that includes giving them office space (3 persons per startup are given office space) internet connectivity and uninterrupted power supply. Providing mentorship of both academic, who totally get engaged with startups to give academic assistance, and technology based as well. 

During Last couple of years MIC-Lahore being the best incubator ever has been enormously successful and serving the real purpose it is made for, by making the small startups to large/giant companies that have been enjoying remarkable success.

Top 13 successful incubations so far, top incubates include XGear, TechJuice, KiaSceneHai.pk and Club Internet. Talking about TechJuice, it is a fairly recent startup,

rooting from the efforts of a single individual who chose to make a splash through a blog. The splash soon caused a ripple effect that encouraged other writers who were passionate about the world of technology, start-up’s and entrepreneurship in the context of Pakistan, to work with TechJuice.

XGear is a predictive analysis and data aggregation platform for vehicles also incubated at Microsoft Innovation Center, Lahore and hosted on Microsoft Azure. XGear helps you to unlock your vehicle’s potential, enabling you to become a safer, better informed and efficient driver. It is designed to connect your car with the rest of the world enabling you to drive smart, for more details visit http://xgear.io/ 

The main purpose of this write up is just to introduce you with MIC-Lahore’s performance and efficiency for business innovation purposes. And how we push initial startup to the stage where it becomes one of the leading business companies. Whether you are an entrepreneur, aspiring university, public organization, policy maker, Private Corporation, researcher, student or someone genuinely interested in incubation, we guarantee that MIC-Lahore will feed your hunger regarding incubation.

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