Flipkart and IIT-Delhi Partner for Research on Personas to Improve Personalized Recommendations for Customers

Provide persona-based shopping experience to customers

Underscore machine learning models’ capability to handle large scale real world data effectively

Flipkart, India’s homegrown marketplace, has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT), the industry interface organisation of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT-D) as part of its ongoing industry-academic alliance initiatives.

As part of the MoU, Flipkart will offer research grants and market insights to FITT to generate granular, data-backed segments of users linked to different e-commerce categories based on shopping behaviour, demographics, surrounding users’ behaviour, etc. On the technical front, the collaborative effort will help to develop a general purpose user activity graph that could be harnessed for different use cases leveraging state-of-the-art GNN (graph neural network) based techniques. The research aims to address the limitation of existing persona creation tools and to learn from a user activity graph that encompasses information about the various personas associated with each user.

Flipkart has been nurturing academic alliances to build an ecosystem of learning and development through industry-focused research to address critical industry problems. Flipkart and FITT will also jointly undertake a number of other initiatives that include organising seminars, offering conference travel grants and engaging in company-sponsored research to support a project on a topic of mutual interest between Flipkart and the researchers from IIT Delhi.

Mayur Datar, Chief Data Scientist at Flipkart, said, “As a home-grown brand, Flipkart has been committed to solving for India. We have developed numerous industry-first capabilities over the years and continue to focus on innovations that will enhance the experience of customers by making their online shopping journey simple through personalised recommendations. Through our collaboration with IIT Delhi, we hope to find a data-driven solution that will enable us to understand our customers requirements and preferences better thereby, allowing us to elevate the shopping experience by offering persona-based recommendations. This will also provide an opportunity for academicians to work on challenges that the industry is grappling with and build innovative solutions that will help in transforming the ecommerce industry.”

Prof. Preeti Ranjan Panda, Dean Corporate Relations, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, said, “By combining Flipkart's industry expertise with the academic prowess of IIT Delhi, this collaboration is poised to contribute significantly to the advancement of e-commerce technologies, ultimately enhancing the way businesses engage with and cater to their diverse customer base."

Prof. Sayan Ranu, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, said “Beyond conducting cutting-edge research in machine learning, which IIT Delhi is already engaged in, it is crucial to translate these technologies into tangible products that can make a real-world impact. Through our collaboration with Flipkart, we aim to achieve precisely that. This research partnership aims to enhance personalized recommendations by incorporating user personas. In addition to persona-fortified product recommendations, this collaboration is poised to have a far-reaching impact by advancing machine learning models capable of handling large-scale real-world data effectively.”

Flipkart has been working with students and faculty members from reputed academic institutions to develop indigenous solutions that address unique real-world challenges confronted in a diverse market like India. Over the last two years, Flipkart signed up five projects across IIT Delhi, Bombay, and IISc.

FITT, AIC-BIMTECH AND HUDDLE Incubator Launch 1st Founders Program for the Founders of New Bharat

Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT-Delhi), Atal Incubation Centre- BIMTECH (AIC-BIMTECH) in Greater Noida, and Huddle Incubator based in Gurgaon have launched a sector agnostic program, tailor made for the start-up founders of young India. This collaboration brings three of the largest startup enabling organizations in Delhi NCR, to create a collaborative support ecosystem for incubation and acceleration of startups. First Founders Program is a five-month program focused on first time founders to help them structure their venture, team with their vision at core, and subsequently raise capital for their ventures.

This program is open for any first-time founder in India across sectors, with a keen interest in deep-tech ventures. Start-ups selected will be provided with the dynamic support of three large incubators in order to tailor-make support functions that include, lab and data computing support, access to a dedicated mentor per venture, proof of concept and test-bed opportunities with corporates across disciplines, legal, accounting and compliance support, followed by opportunities to raise grants and seed funding.

Applications shall open from February 11 until March 3, 2020, with results of selected ventures scheduled to be announced by March 17, 2020.

Startups can apply at the following link - https://www.f6s.com/ffp/apply

Huddle has incubated ventures like leading super foods and wellness brand Wellversed Ketofy, blockchain startup 1Ramp, deep-tech venture Trillbit, EV ventures like RacRnergy, Cell Propulsion under a list of over 20 successful innovative ventures in their portfolio, whereas IIT- Delhi has seen over 100 technology ventures like Kritikal, Wrig Nano, NanoClean Global, Clensta, Creditas etc. Similarly, AIC-BIMTECH being a host to ventures, like Trucksuvidha, LQI, makes this a collective portfolio of ventures, that is bound to support the incoming list of ventures this Trio of incubators is looking to invest time, resources and capital in.

Dr Anil Wali Managing Director, FITT discussed how this program came into existence. “Many ecosystem enablers like incubators, accelerators, corporates, investors etc. have been trying to address the challenges faced by the start-ups in stabilizing and scaling up. The conclusion we reached, was not singular, but a group of issues that impact startups, especially founders, during their journey towards sustainability. If the issue is complex enough not to be resolved by one of us, why not join hands with other strong ecosystem partners?” asked Dr Wali.

Dr. Abha Rishi, CEO, AIC-BIMTECH invited the young founders to participate in the program. She said, “Being an internal part of the ecosystem makes you realize the shortcomings which startups faces on their journey to even reach breakeven. First Founders Program is our resolve towards the collaborative approach required in the entrepreneurial ecosystem."

Mr Sanil Sachar, Co-founder, Huddle expressed his desire to support the ambitions of the founders. “I have been on the end of the founders and the other side as an enabler, therefore, to solve the problem with such partners is a robust way forward. I understand how it feels when the passion is not converted into a success story and what is needed to fuel this. First Founders Program is to take care of those factors, back founders through their path from being a startup to a sustainable and then a large profitable organization."

Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT) is an industrial interface organization. For over twenty- five years now, FITT has been in a mission mode for effecting the interface between the Institute and the industry and has been devising innovative ways to create partnerships and linkages with business and community to enable knowledge transfer for common good. 

Atal Incubation Centre- BIMTECH is an Incubation Centre supported by Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog. Its objective is to create high-class incubation facilities with suitable physical infrastructure in terms of capital equipment and operating facilities, coupled with the availability of sector specific experts for mentoring the startups so that innovators and their ventures can become successful entrepreneurs and enterprises. 

Huddle is one of India’s leading sector-agnostic incubators working with startups across industries, with the primary focus of working closely with the founders of each venture and supporting them through the business functions that require assistance in order to get them to the next stage of their business life cycle. In order to provide contextual support to each startup, Huddle's mentor base consists of 35 industry-specific experts from around the country.

To know more about them – www.huddle.work