The Vedanta Group has announced the launch of “Vedanta Spark”, an initiative wherein the company is looking to partner with early-stage, growth stage and venture stage Digital Tech start-ups in order to leverage innovation and growth opportunities. More than 200 participants joined the launch event of the global start-up accelerator program, which was streamed live on Zoom and Facebook. Through Vedanta Spark, the company seeks young & innovative start-up companies and specialists to come forward and join hands with Vedanta thus unlocking value and growth potential at an accelerated pace. Vedanta Spark is looking at start-ups from across the globe as part of the program, working in areas such as 360 Degree Sustainability & Excellence in HSE, Operational Excellence – Volume, Recovery & Efficiency Improvement, Asset Optimization and Predictive Maintenance, Exploration, Mining & Blasting, so and so forth. “We are focused on nurturing Innovation at Vedanta and making it a way of working across all our operations and functions to energize and encourage our passionate leaders to think and act differently. It is our firm belief that by including innovation in everything we do will transform the entire organization and will bring a fresh energy and speed.” said Sharad Gargiya, Senior VP, Group Commercial, Vedanta LimitedSpeaking on the launch, Anand Laxshmivarahan R, Chief Digital Officer, Vedanta,said “To foster innovative thinking for disruptive ideas, it is essential to engage with people inside as well as outside the organization who can challenge the status-quo and offer a different perspective.”The initiative will offer various advantages for the start-ups – Partnerships & Collaborations, leverage massive capacity & resources of Vedanta group, tech & business expertise and most importantly strategic investments opportunities for the start-ups that offer significant value to Vedanta Limited. “Easily the most comprehensive corporate open innovation program in India thus far, spanning 16 opportunity themes and over 75 innovation challenges, cutting across several core industrial functions in a globally diversified conglomerate as Vedanta Resources Limited. Envisioned to catalyse the seeding, building and scaling up of a permanent corporate innovation function to exploit start-ups as innovation and growth partners, Vedanta Spark is an amazing opportunity for Forge to execute a global corporate start-up accelerator program.” said Vish Sahasranamam, Co-Founder & CEO, Forge. The project will start with a discovery phase for start-ups to register on the website www.vedantaspark.com, choose the challenge area according to their expertise and then fill an application form and submit a pitch explaining their technology and benefits for Vedanta. From an expected 1000+ registrations across the globe, Top 20 start-ups will get a chance to work with the different entities of Vedanta following a thorough evaluation process by expert panels consisting of Vedanta’s professionals, domain experts and external mentors from reputed govt. ministries and industrial. The program partner for Vedanta Spark is Forge (incubator for Managed Corporate Innovation &Start-up Accelerator Services that has worked with Ministry of Defence, NITI Aayog etc.)