Nitin Gupta Cofounder and CEO Sickle Innovations Private Limited

Nitin Gupta is Cofounder and CEO at Sickle Innovations Private Limited. Nitin is product designer with mechanical engineering background. Prior to starting up Nitin worked as scientist at ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) for three years (2008-11). He is a graduate from Indian Institute of Science. Being born in agriculturally rich town, Nitin always wanted to bring latest technologies and processes to agricultural domain. Following his dream, Nitin along with his friend Vinay Reddy started Sickle Innovations in January 2014 to solve some of the major burning problems of farmers with technology. Nitin enjoys working in farms from empathizing of farmers’ problems to testing new products. Nitin has won RC fellowship of 2015 and is a president awarded scout.

About Sickle Innovations:

Sickle Innovations design and manufacture next generation smart solutions for farm mechanization. Their award winning low cost solutions cater to the small farm (less than 2 ha) segment which contribute to more than 80% of Indian farms and have almost no solutions for mechanization. The same scenario is present in many developing countries with similar farming practices. Launched in 2014, Sickle has launched first two products in the current financial year with the brand name Hectare. Mango picker which cuts mangoes with stalk and an apple picker which harvests apples from trees without damaging new sprouts and apples. Sickle was awarded with ‘Innovative Company of the Year 2016’ by ISBA.



“Design practices used for Social Enterprise”

Abstract:

Design is considered as a very expensive term when it comes to product development for BOP segment. At Sickle we implemented design processes at various stages of product life cycle and found out importance of using these practices. There are challenges, opportunities and desired trade-offs of using these design methodologies in product development process for BOP and especially from the perspective of building a startup around such products. I will share our tailored and ever-evolving design process being used at Sickle.