Why we build inside campuses, not beside them

Every incubator I visited in the first three years had the same problem. It was ten kilometres from the students it was meant to serve, open from ten to five, and required a form to enter. Distance is not a logistics issue. It is the whole issue.

A student with three free hours between classes will walk two hundred metres to build something. They will not take a bus across the district. So we stopped asking where the best place to put infrastructure was, and started asking where the students already are. The answer was obvious and slightly humbling: they are on campus, and they are there anyway.

That is what a Techies Park is. Not a building we own on land we bought, but a working space inside a college that already has four hundred people walking past it every day. The cost of getting someone to try is close to zero. That single number changes everything downstream.

The second reason is political, in the small sense. When the infrastructure is inside the institution, the institution has a stake in it working. Principals introduce us to their best students. Faculty send us projects. Nobody has to be convinced twice, because the proof is in the corridor they walk down every morning.

We are not asking anyone to drop out. I want to be very clear about this, because it gets repeated wrongly. A well-rounded education opens doors that a single skill does not. Our agenda is to strengthen the academic system by fixing what it is missing from inside it, not to compete with it from outside.