National Incubation Center Karachi hosted Dr. Javaid Laghari, Convenor of the Higher Education Commission Task Force on Offices of Research, Innovation, and Commercialization and Incubators, representing HEC Pakistan, for a productive engagement focused on strengthening the institutional and policy infrastructure that supports incubation centres operating under universities and at the national level. The delegation also included Professor Shehnila Zardari, Chairperson of the Department of Software Engineering at NED University of Engineering and Technology, Professor Dr. Riaz Uddin, Director of the Office of Research, Innovation, and Commercialization at NED University and Principal Investigator of the Haptics, Human-Robotics, and Condition Monitoring Lab, and Dr. Faizan Ahmed Mirza, Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics and Management Sciences at NED University. The composition of the delegation, combining national policy leadership with senior academic and research expertise, reflects the multi-level engagement required to meaningfully strengthen Pakistan’s incubation ecosystem across both policy frameworks and institutional implementation.
During the visit, the NIC Karachi team presented its accomplishments, incubation model, and the specific mechanisms it uses to support startups, including its induction process and the broader startup support infrastructure that has developed across multiple cohorts of operation. This presentation gave the visiting delegation a detailed, practitioner-level understanding of how a well-established national incubation centre actually operates, complementing the policy and academic perspectives that Dr. Laghari and the NED University representatives bring from their respective institutional vantage points. The delegation toured the NIC Karachi facility, gaining direct exposure to the physical and operational infrastructure that supports the centre’s incubation activities, before engaging in substantive discussions on the broader role that incubation centres play in driving startup development and innovation-led economic growth across Pakistan.
Dr. Javaid Laghari’s role as Convenor of the HEC Task Force on ORICs and Incubators positions him at the centre of national policy conversations about how university-based research commercialisation offices and incubation centres should be structured, funded, and evaluated to maximise their contribution to Pakistan’s innovation economy. His engagement with NIC Karachi, one of the country’s most established and high-performing national incubation centres, provides valuable input for the task force’s broader work of developing frameworks and standards that can be applied across the university-based incubation landscape, many components of which are considerably less developed than NIC Karachi’s model. The participation of NED University’s senior faculty, including the leadership of its own Office of Research, Innovation, and Commercialization, reflects the university’s active engagement with these national policy conversations and its interest in strengthening its own institutional approach to research commercialisation and startup support by learning directly from NIC Karachi’s experience.
The discussions during the visit explored opportunities for collaboration between NIC Karachi, HEC, and academia more broadly, addressing the question of how national incubation centres and university-based ORICs and incubators can work together more effectively rather than operating as parallel, disconnected systems serving overlapping populations of researchers and aspiring founders. The visit underscored a shared commitment among all parties to strengthening industry-academia linkages, advancing entrepreneurship, and creating meaningful opportunities for emerging founders and innovators, objectives that depend significantly on the kind of structural alignment and knowledge sharing between national incubation infrastructure and university research commercialisation offices that this engagement was designed to advance. Backed by Tech Destination Pakistan, the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication, Ignite, LMKT, LuckyOne Mall, and Orbit Ventures, NIC Karachi’s continued engagement with national policy bodies and leading academic institutions reflects its role not just as an incubation centre but as a contributor to the broader institutional architecture shaping Pakistan’s innovation ecosystem.
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