Airbus Bizlab

In BizLab, Airbus found an opportunity and zeroed in on India and Bengaluru was selected as its base as it is home to a well endowed ecosystem for entrepreneurs

- A.K. Sachdev

Since the late 1990S, Airbus as a European consortium and the American aerospace giant Boeing, have been engaged in a duopolistic rivalry in the large airliner space in civil aircraft manufacturing industry. The quantum of orders they bag every year match each other; so do the accusations they exchange about unfair state patronage from their respective ‘protectionist’ governments. Both have presence in India, with the Airbus A320 family enjoying huge popularity with airlines that have come up since the new low-cost airline wave ushered in by Captain Gopinath’s Air Deccan in 2003. Needless to say, both Airbus and Boeing are constantly vying with each other to innovate and steal a march over the other. Airbus, in an endeavour to exploit creative and inventive ideas from within its own dominion as also from customers, partners and industry resources, launched its own aerospace business accelerator in September 2015 at Toulouse, the company’s headquarters. India has been one of the early beneficiaries of Airbus BizLab, the name given to this initiative.

AIRBUS BIZLAB. BizLab’s modus operandi is to seek applications from entrepreneur and startup companies for the acceleration programme. Airbus employees, termed ‘intrapreneurs’, are also invited to participate by sending in proposals for innovation. The support offered over a six month “acceleration programme” provides extremely valuable exposure to coaches, mentors and industry professionals in the areas that a startup struggles to sustain itself. This includes relevant technology, legal issues, protection of Intellectual Property (IP) rights, marketing, communication, pitching for funding, finding a test environment for a new product and, in some cases, even finding customers. In short, BizLab provides the much-needed assistance to a fledgling company right when it needs it most.