Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M) has launched a Centre for Research on Start-Ups and Risk Financing (CREST) to provide academic and thought leadership in innovation, entrepreneurship and risk capital. It will create a unique world-class data repository on Indian start-ups and ventures to address a major hurdle for engaging in high-quality research. The information resource would be made accessible for researchers and policymakers that can result in top-tier publications.

CREST's vision is to get globally recognised as a leading centre of research engaged in scholarly research in the areas of creation, development, and financing of innovation, start-ups, and entrepreneurship; Cross country collaborative research, resulting in the use of unique data sets on start-ups and venture capital that increases the chances of breakthrough findings and evidence synthesis on the start-up and innovation ecosystem to inform policymakers and practitioners.

The key mission of CREST would be to engage in scholarly research encompassing the areas of innovation, entrepreneurship, and risk capital. The data repository being developed on innovation, venturing and risk capital will create the infrastructure to carry out high-quality research. The creation of entrepreneurship specific language models will facilitate a better understanding of the entities in the ecosystem while facilitating the use of the latest research in AI, ML to generate new insights.

CREST will also push for use of evidence to guide policymaking. CREST will synthesise existing evidence as well as generate new evidence-based on unique data sets from organisations in the start-up ecosystem such as incubators, investor networks, government missions, and so on.