Dr. Jhunjhunwala recognised quite early that encouraging students and alumni to become entrepreneurs, specifically in high technology areas, is a key goal of the IITs. In the 80s, he helped incubate a company called “Benchmark Systems” formed by some IITM alumni. From mid-nineties such effort was taken up in a much more focussed manner and five companies were incubated in the department of Electrical Engineering at IITM. In 1995 nine students of IIT got together to form “Midas Communication Technologies Pvt Ltd”, which carried out development of Wireless in Local Loop along with IIT Madras. A couple of years later, Banyan Networks was incubated with some IITM students to develop Computer Networking products. Similarly AdventNet (Vembu Systems), Nilgiri Networks, NMS works, Chennai Kavigal and n-Logue were started with the help of TeNeT group – all focussed on providing telecom and Internet in India. Today, Dr.Ashok Jhunjhunwala is working to set up an R&D park in vicinity of IITM in the model of Stanford Research Labs.
