by Dr Nawab John Dar
Incubation centres in Kashmir risk undermining young founders by interrupting pitches, triggering stress that impairs performance, discouraging innovation, and weakening the ecosystem. Respectful listening and domain-relevant evaluation are essential for nurturing early talent
A worrying pattern has emerged across incubation centres in Kashmir. Young founders who want to pitch their ideas with high hopes are being stopped on the very first slide, often with a dismissive remark such as “we already know this.” This may seem like a minor interruption, but its consequences are serious. It damages the quality of the pitch, undermines the confidence of emerging talent, and defeats the very purpose of incubation.
Experienced innovators understand that the first slide typically presents the problem statement. Even when a problem appears familiar, the founder’s perspective is rarely identical to the panel’s understanding. Every innovator approaches a known challenge from a distinct angle, whether through new user insights, emerging technologies, or novel approaches to creating value. When experts cut a presenter short before hearing this context, they are not assessing innovation. They are silencing it.
How Does It Change Brain Chemistry?
This is not merely an emotional issue. It is biological. When a presenter is abruptly interrupted and dismissed by an expert panel, whether in a closed room or on an online call, the brain registers this as a direct threat. These presentations may not happen in front of large audiences, but the psychological stakes are just as high. The founder has spent weeks or months preparing. They have built hopes that their idea might finally be heard, appreciated, and perhaps funded. They are presenting to people whose approval could change their lives. In this context, a dismissive interruption from an evaluator carries enormous weight. The brain does not need a crowd to feel threatened. It only needs to perceive that something important is at risk.
The human brain did not evolve to distinguish between physical danger and social danger. When someone is dismissed by figures of authority in a high-stakes setting, the same region that processes physical pain becomes active. This region, called the anterior cingulate cortex, responds to social exclusion in much the same way it responds to bodily injury. Brain imaging studies have confirmed this overlap repeatedly.
When a person says “that hurt” after being dismissed in public, they are not speaking metaphorically. They are describing what is actually happening inside their skull. The brain genuinely registers social rejection as a form of pain.
Cortisol levels are already high before a pitch because the body senses pressure and uncertainty, and they spike even higher when someone gets interrupted with dismissive remarks, since the brain reads it as a direct threat and pushes the adrenal glands to release a much stronger stress surge. The prefrontal cortex, which sits behind the forehead, is responsible for working memory, logical reasoning, and the ability to organise complex thoughts.
This is precisely the part of the brain a founder needs most when explaining a business model or responding to difficult questions. Unfortunately, the prefrontal cortex is highly sensitive to cortisol. When stress hormones flood the system, activity in this region drops significantly. The brain essentially redirects its resources away from complex thinking and toward basic survival responses.
The founder is now trying to deliver a sophisticated presentation while the very part of their brain responsible for sophisticated thinking has been impaired. This is not a weakness. This is biology. It happens to everyone. The most confident, most prepared, most resilient person in the room will still experience this neurological response when publicly dismissed. The only variable is how severely it affects their performance.
For a young founder presenting for the first time, facing a panel of senior experts, in a high-stakes environment, the effect can be devastating. Not because they lack ability, but because their brain have been pushed into a state where ability cannot be properly expressed.
Why Does Resilience Not Justify Preventable Harm?
Some might argue that entrepreneurs must be resilient and that harsh feedback simply separates those who can handle pressure from those who cannot. This argument misunderstands both resilience and the role of incubation. Psychological resilience is indeed essential for entrepreneurs. It helps founders navigate genuine adversity and persevere through real setbacks. However, resilience is a capacity that develops through facing meaningful challenges, not through arbitrary dismissal before one has the chance to be heard.
There is a critical difference between the productive stress of building a company under uncertainty and the destructive stress of being publicly humiliated before presenting an idea. The former builds capability. The latter damages it.
The research is clear: social-evaluative threat, particularly when combined with lack of control, produces the most severe and long-lasting stress responses. This is not the kind of challenge that builds character. It is the kind that drives promising founders away.
Moreover, resilient individuals are not immune to the biological effects of social threat. Even people with strong coping abilities experience the stress response when publicly dismissed. The goal should be to channel these responses productively, not to inflict them needlessly. Incubation centres exist to support founders through genuine challenges, not to create artificial ones through dismissive behaviour.
Why Does This Matter for Kashmir’s Innovation Ecosystem?
Kashmir is witnessing growing interest in entrepreneurship. Incubation centres have been established to nurture this movement and develop a generation of job creators. But the role of senior panellists is to encourage, guide, and refine ideas. They are supporters of early talent at its most fragile stage, not gatekeepers wielding rejection.
If founders feel dismissed before they can explain their approach, they are less likely to return. They may abandon promising concepts or leave the ecosystem entirely. An incubation centre that develops a reputation for dismissive feedback risks losing high-potential innovators long before their ideas can mature.
Many established incubation programmes across India and globally follow evidence-based practices: uninterrupted presentation time, structured questions, and trained mentors who understand how to provide constructive feedback. Newly formed centres, particularly those without deep exposure to entrepreneurship culture, must be especially vigilant. Mistakes made now can shape the region’s innovative climate for years to come.
How Incubation Centres Must Work?
Let the speaker speak. This is not a complicated request. When a founder is given five minutes to present, those five minutes belong to the founder. Interruptions during the allotted time are not signs of expertise. They are failures of professional conduct. Questions belong in the question period. Observations belong after the presentation.
The panel’s job during the pitch is to listen, not to perform. Beyond basic courtesy, incubation centres must recognise that evaluation requires domain-specific expertise. No single panellist, regardless of experience, can meaningfully evaluate ten different ideas spanning healthcare, agriculture, technology, education, and manufacturing in a single afternoon.
When a health innovation is judged by someone whose background is in finance, or when an agricultural solution is dismissed by someone who has never worked with farmers, the evaluation becomes meaningless. Worse, it becomes dangerous. Promising ideas die not because they lack merit, but because they were never understood by the people judging them. Incubation centres must build panels with relevant expertise for each domain, or they must acknowledge that they are not equipped to evaluate certain categories of innovation.
There is also a deeper problem with how some centres measure their own success. Receiving 100 applications does not mean an incubation centre is working. Conducting 50 pitch sessions does not mean value has been created. The true measure of an incubation centre is not the volume of activity but the quality of outcomes.
Their ideas that were nurtured, refined, and supported until they created real value for society represent more success than a hundred ideas that were heard, dismissed, and forgotten. Incubation is not a filtering process. It is a development process. The goal is not to identify the ideas that are already perfect. The goal is to help imperfect ideas become stronger through guidance, mentorship, and patient support.
Incubation centres must also remember that they are not doing charity. The funding that flows through government schemes and incubation programmes is not a gift. It comes as equity or debt. The founder who receives funding is not receiving a favour. They are entering into a financial relationship where they will either give up a share of their company or take on an obligation to repay. This means the founder is a partner, not a beneficiary. They deserve to be treated with the respect that any business partner deserves.
The attitude that incubators are somehow blessing founders with money they should be grateful for is not only inaccurate, it is harmful to the entire ecosystem. It creates a power imbalance that discourages honest dialogue and drives away founders who have self-respect.
If incubation centres do not understand this purpose, they will continue to lose the very talent they were created to develop. Young entrepreneurs will learn that these spaces are not safe for early-stage thinking. They will stop coming. They will take their ideas elsewhere, or they will abandon them entirely. The centres will be left with only those founders who already have polished presentations and established networks, which defeats the entire purpose of incubation.
A Final Word
Kashmir has talent. It has ideas. It has potential. What it needs now is an ecosystem that protects emerging founders from preventable harm and evaluates them with the seriousness they deserve. A single dismissive comment can end an entrepreneurial journey before it begins. A panel without domain expertise can kill an idea it never understood. A centre that counts applications instead of outcomes can mistake activity for progress.
The responsibility lies with those who hold power in these rooms. Senior panellists, centre directors, and ecosystem leaders must ask themselves a simple question: are we here to support founders, or are we here to provide expertise? The answer to that question will determine whether Kashmir builds a thriving innovation economy or watches its best minds walk away.
The first slide should be the beginning of a conversation, not the end of it.
(The author is a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute and is currently pursuing an entrepreneurship programme at Santa Clara University, California. Ideas are personal.)
