As India grows, our cities are expanding rapidly. Urban planners, policymakers, and governments face the unique problem of balancing rapid urbanisation with sustainability. India’s population is said to grow over the next three decades, putting immense pressure on our infrastructure, housing, and the environment. However, it is impossible to build an equitable and sustainable future.
The urbanisation dilemma
Once considered a pensioners’ paradise, Bengaluru has now metamorphosized into India’s IT and startup capital with more than half its population being migrants. This is a stark example of India’s broader urban challenges. Between 1973 and 2022, the city’s built-up area exploded from 3.85% to 55.71%, transforming its landscape and straining infrastructure, reflecting a national trend.
A core issue of unplanned urbanisation is the need for intra-city mobility and transportation. The rapid increase in private vehicles has created severe congestion, worsened by inadequate public transportation.
Water management is critical as growing populations strain resources. Bengaluru relies on the Cauvery River, rainwater, and groundwater, yet lacks infrastructure for rainwater capture, and groundwater levels are dangerously low. When the Cauvery’s levels dropped, residents faced shortages, highlighting the urgent need for sustainable water solutions.
These issues are just the tip of the iceberg, as housing, waste management, and sanitation challenges are also rising. There is an urgent need for innovative urban planning, as current infrastructure methods cannot meet India’s growing challenges.
Introducing venture studios: A bold new approach
Venture studios are innovative, creative interventions for a growing city’s tough challenges. A venture studio invests and builds startups and initiatives through partnership, mentorship, providing vast networks, and capacity building. What sets the venture studio model apart is its active role in creating and co-founding solutions to tackle specific challenges. These studios collaborate with governments, academia, and industry to develop tailored solutions.
Venture studios could address critical issues in India like transportation, water management, and affordable housing by launching startups focused on sustainable public transport or water-saving technologies, reducing traffic, emissions, and empowering localised solutions.
The Venture Studio model
Globally, some notable examples of venture studios demonstrate how successful this model can be. For instance, the ‘MIT REAP’ (Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program) initiative played a crucial role in transforming Singapore into a hub for innovation by aligning academia, policy and industry with the venture ecosystem to tackle urban challenges. Similarly, urban innovation labs backed by venture studios are generating breakthroughs in the Netherlands’ affordable housing technologies and smart city infrastructure. For example, an initiative to simplify parking reduced city noise, congestion, fuel use, and pollution by 30%, while lowering driver stress and boosting parking revenue.
With its Smart Cities Mission and AMRUT (Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation), India offers fertile ground for venture studios to flourish and tackle complex urban challenges. Studios can contribute to urban development by fostering startups that directly address the challenges of India’s expanding cities by mapping stakeholder priorities granularly and collaborating with diverse actors to design unique solutions.
Venture Studios like NOW Venture Studio focus on sustainability and climate tech specifically looking to solve problems for the built environment, decarbonization, energy efficiency, etc. Deep tech and deep science-backed ideas require adequate nurturing in their early stages considering the founders may come from specific technical backgrounds and have minimum business acumen. As an institutional co-founder, the venture studio model will bring specialised services like IP management, subject matter experts, access to the network, etc, while hand-holding the idea until they meet their first paying customer or next institutional investors.
The studio grows if the idea grows, the idea grows if it is solving a real problem!
Venture Studios: Pros and cons
The venture studio model offers three vital benefits: collaboration, scalability, and agility, which are values currently missing from our civic interventions and solutions. First, collaboration is central to the model. Studios thrive on partnerships with universities, corporations and policymakers, ensuring the solutions are practical and impactful. Secondly, the model is scalable, i.e. once the proof of concept is done and the prototype ready, the model can be replicated in other cities by adapting to hyperlocal contexts. Finally, it allows for rapid prototyping and testing of urban solutions, which makes the response to a challenge more timely, thus mitigating the compounding of issues due to neglect.
Venture studios hold promise but face challenges. Securing consistent funding is tough, as urban ventures need large investments with slow returns. Cross-sector collaboration is also challenging within complex civic governance, where private-sector agility often clashes with the slower, holistic public approach, potentially delaying the scaling of innovations.
However, these challenges are not unsolvable. To overcome funding issues, venture studios can partner with established government initiatives like AMRUT, ensuring financial backing for sustainable startups. Dedicated communication channels between stakeholders and setting common goals can help align interests and streamline collaboration.
A promising path for Indian cities
The Venture Studio model provides a scalable and dynamic solution to India’s urbanisation challenges, blending innovation with practical problem-solving. By fostering startups focused on urban issues and decarbonization, venture studios can transform India’s cities into sustainable, resilient hubs. With strong partnerships, design thinking, and collaboration, this model offers a promising path for urban planners. The first step: rallying the commitment to embrace and scale the venture studio model.
