Dr Jitendra Singh to Startups: Become the Bridge From Lab to Market

India's startup founders have been handed a clear brief: don't just build companies — carry science to the marketplace. Dr Jitendra Singh has said that startups must become vehicles for lab-to-market technology transfer, according to The Hans India — a message that places young firms at the very heart of the country's innovation pipeline.

A direct call to founders

The minister's remarks cut to a long-standing frustration in the research world: too much promising science never leaves the lab. By casting startups as the vehicle for technology transfer, Dr Singh is effectively asking founders to pick up where academic research stops — to do the hard, often unglamorous work of testing, refining and selling ideas that were born in laboratories.

"Startups must become vehicles for lab-to-market technology transfer."

— Dr Jitendra Singh

Why lab-to-market transfer matters

Technology transfer — the journey of an idea from a research bench to a paying customer — is widely regarded as one of the toughest legs of innovation. Laboratories are built to discover. Markets demand something else entirely: products that work, at prices people will pay, delivered at scale. Startups, with their appetite for risk and their speed, are often better suited to that crossing than the institutions where the science begins.

What it means for the ecosystem

For founders, the message reads as both validation and challenge. Validation, because it treats startups as essential infrastructure for innovation rather than a fringe bet. Challenge, because technology transfer is slow, capital-hungry work — licensing research, proving it outside controlled conditions, and persuading customers to take a chance on something new.

Dr Singh's framing suggests that journey now sits close to the centre of the government's science agenda. For India's startups, the invitation is on the table: the labs have ideas, the market has needs, and someone has to build the bridge.