This is a cross post from an Academic Ventures blog post."It has been my dream to have an ecosystem that creates a highway from Indian university labs to the market. One of the steps in that direction was to jump into the sea and help things on my own. The next step is to replicate myself and create a hundred people with a missionary zeal about invention and innovation in this country.If India has to keep growing, innovation is not a choice. It is an imperative. The only question is how soon can we make it work. And when we do that, we have an opportunity to transform the future of more than 1.2 Billion people, and, therefore, the future of this world....
There are two sets of organizations involved in the creating a funnel for technological innovation for the industry. First, there is the source of invention. In India, most of the breakthrough research happens in an organized sector funded primarily by government. This money, spent through thousands of bright researchers spread across CSIR, DRDO, ISRO, IITs, NITs and other institutions. We can all argue that the quality of research output in these institutions itself isn’t great enough and only a fraction of it is worth adoption by the industry or creation of a sustainable new venture. Although we can do a lot about improving this fraction, the bigger challenge is that nothing is really happening to even this fraction of decent-to-good quality research output in direction of bringing it to the market. Because, once commercialization happens, it kickstarts the virtuous cycle of money channeled back from the market to further advance the cause of research.
Once this research comes out of the lab, the second kind of agencies get involved in the process. These are Technology Commercialization agents. Some of these people are part of the university system (like R&D departments of IITs, or IP department of DRDO and CSIR), while some others are in private sector (like, Academic Ventures). Our job is very crucial – to translate technology into a strong business case from which a new business (or product) can emerge. However, our kind of professionals are rare to find in India. Even those who exist are fragmented, tired of trying to make things work or have simply lost hope if India could ever create an Imperial Innovations.
It is not that there are no success stories. FICCI is doing a good job with Indian Innovation Growth Program and DRDO-ATAC. Skyquest is doing India’s first Technology Marketplaces. And Villgro is involved in promotion of rural inventions. This is in addition to great work by Prof Anil Gupta of NIF and Srishti and Prof AS Rao’s (now retired) imaginative TePP program.
But this much, as one can see, just a start. Today, every corporate house which sees future in India, is looking at investing in innovations. Indian entrepreneurs are gaining huge favor among VCs of the world. And it is now becoming ‘cool’ to be innovative and have your own startup.
What is missing is a concerted effort by all the people who are passionate about the goal of an innovation-driven India. We need to join our hands together to share best practices, resources, opportunities, contacts and experiences to make things work for India. The challenge is immense and beyond any one of us. But together we can win. For, if we fail, we fail an entire nation!"
Update (19th May 2011): After writing this blog post, I started a discussion on a Linkedin Group of Technology Commercialization professionals of India snowballed into a massive discussion with all members contributing passionately to the debate with 125+ comments. We are all set to have a first joint event at NAARM, Hyderabad led by Dr DSK Rao in Aug 2011.
