Want more Startups and Innovations coming from Indian Colleges?

As a part of my PhD at Purdue, I published many papers and contributed to several successful research grants. But, I was not so happy at the end, because, the technologies I worked on, turned out to be too difficult to fabricate and fell short of materializing into real products. I decided to come back to India and join my alma mater, IIT Kharagpur, as a faculty. I always wanted to do that, because this profession offers a great deal of freedom and opportunities in terms of choosing areas of interest, working on innovative projects, associating with startups and NGOs, doing consultancy, working with govt agencies and corporate players as well. I soon got involved in an Agri-tech Startup as a co-founder and worked on a range of innovative digital products involving cutting edge technologies like IOT and AI. Certainly, my academic ambitions took a backseat and my publication records suffered, not because, I did not find time to work on research papers, but rather, because I found myself much more excited about doing something real on ground. Luckily, I see today, so much emphasis being given to entrepreneurial and product oriented research on IIT campuses by the education ministry. In this article, I elaborate upon few important strategic points, that I feel, need to be incorporated by the IITs, to help their professors and students in this direction.

PhD candidates spend 4-5 years on our elite academic campuses. They have access to the most cutting edge lab-facilities and infrastructure. We have indeed seen several useful prototype products and solutions being demonstrated as a part of PhD research on IIT campuses. The present government has emphasized the need of product oriented research in the elite institutions. The startup ecosystem of the country has a rich pool of accelerators, incubators and early stage investors who are ready to work hand in hand with elite campuses and support emerging ideas, provide mentorship, consultancy and funding support to teams having innovative and impactful solutions and prototypes and help them take firm steps towards venture formation.

Currently PhDs are awarded based on publications. The problem statement for a new PhD candidate is therefore set based on the potential of publications: Is it a hot area? Is it easy to generate publishable ideas on this topic? Is it possible to get sponsored projects from various agencies on this problem statement? These are all certainly very pertinent questions. There is a category of research-domains which bears the 'fundamental' tag. Such topics may deal with advancement of theory, analysis and fundamental techniques rather than development of application and products. They have their own importance. But surely, in an elite engineering institute like ours, there is expected to be a large fraction of research students working on applications and product oriented ideas. Many such research activities may be part of funded projects and may provide knowledge inputs to prestigious national organizations like ISRO and DRDO , while many others may result in technology transfer to the private sector. All such accomplishments are given credit and recognition by the IIT system.

However, so far, there are limited incentives for promoting entrepreneurial spirit among the faculty and the associated research students. Being a mentor/advisor/stakeholder/founder of a startup is still seen as a side work, unless it is in the form of a sponsored projects and there is some research/consultancy grant provided to a faculty, routed through the institute's financial administration system. There are but limited windows for inducting IIT as a stake holder and enabler for those startups. A more formal mechanism therefore must be chalked out in this direction. For instance, at Rajendra Mishra School of Engineering Entrepreneurship of IIT Kharagpur, we have created a strong platform for supporting startup teams on campus, with the help of associated accelerator programs. But unless there is a formal mechanism at the institute level, enabling incentivization and formal association of the startups with the institute, such platforms my find limited number of takers among the faculty. Working on a startup brings a set of challenges beyond just technical RnD. Of course many such components can be assisted through startup-support platforms like ours. But, if more excitement and enthusiasm has to be generated among faculty members, the institute must pitch in and bring more incentives.

On the students' side, promoting startup oriented research may require some innovations in the PhD evaluation process. Recently, IIT Kharagpur has taken a major step in this direction, by allowing PhD candidates to defend their thesis on the basis of a patent, in place of open publications. This certainly helps in securing product oriented ideas for future commercialization. However, several other important steps can be taken to facilitate the best possible utilization of PhD candidates' tenure on the campus. The most fundamental process of problem definition and ideation needs to be augmented by evaluating them from the perspective of market needs and commercialization, akin to a B-Plan evaluation process. In a B-Plan event, we don't only look at how sophisticated and fantastic the technology is. We evaluate the problem from the commercial angle: How prevalent the problem is? Can the proposed solution be converted into a sellable product, with a definite target market segment? How risky the technology is? Does the market already have similar solutions by competitors? What would be the SWOT analysis of such a venture? What about the revenue model, operations and long term sustainability? All these questions need to be asked, so that the student is confident that so many months of his work gradually sees the light of the day in the form of a real product. Such analysis should form a part of the PhD thesis. An Entrepreneurship School like ours may be easily able to extend support in the form of external review, consultancy from startup experts, team support and even funding opportunities needed for deserving ideas, with the help of our extended network within the startup-up eco-system of the country.

In summary, IITs need to act on both these fronts, namely, incentivization strategies for faculty and students along with formalization of institutional mechanism for partnering with and supporting campus startups. Only then, we can expect our IITs to come at par with schools like Stanford, which have a long history of churning out highly successful startups out of research labs.

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