The second edition of the Industry Conclave – Connections 2019: Creating Opportunity to Stimulate Industry-Academia Partnerships – was held today at the institute. The event saw participation from more than 50 industries from a wide range of sectors viz. auto, chemicals, construction, IT and data science, materials, pharma, engineering and so on. Some of the leading companies included Zydus, Tata Motors, Tata Chemicals, HILTI, Honeywell, Aditya Birla, Forbes Marshall, Optimized Solutions and ITC, among others.
Giving an overview of IITGN culture and ethos to the industry participants in his inaugural speech, Prof Sudhir K Jain, director, IITGN said that IITGN’s mission for the past 11 years has been to set the tone for the future. The entire process of building this institution has been driven by building a long-term culture.
Highlighting the core values of IITGN, Professor Jain said, “We have designed ourselves around three key ideas: 1) Students first; our entire mission is student-oriented. We invest our time, energy and resources on the students; 2) Research for impact; how the society, industry and economy benefit from research is extremely important to us. We want to produce research that will make a positive impact on society, economy or industry; and 3) Societal Conscience; we are fully conscious that we are supported by public money and that we must be extremely sensitive to societal problems. We would like our students to graduate with a sense of social responsibility so that they can multiply this wherever they go in the future.”
Mr Kris Gopalakrishnan (co-founder, Infosys), Chairman of the Advisory Council of the Research Park and the IITGN Innovation and Entrepreneurship Centre (IIEC), chaired the conclave. In his keynote speech, Mr Gopalakrishnan drew attention of the participants towards inevitable transitions and ways to keep up with these changes and said, “We are living in a period of very rapid transitions and sometimes abrupt transitions. The ideal way to deal with these is to invest in research and build our own capacities. Continuous reinvention has to be part of the DNA of every industry, company and business.”
Today, the world economy is about 80 trillion dollars as against 11 trillion dollars in 1980. A lot of value has been created by companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft that grew out of universities. Growth in the future will be created by artificial intelligence, machine learning, the Internet of Things, 3D printing, biology, genomics and so on. The industries must take advantage of these and introduce new products. This is why companies need to work in close collaboration with the academic and research communities outside their organisations. At IITGN Research Park, you get the freedom and ability to leverage the ecosystem to your advantage.
Mr Kris GopalakrishnanHe also advised the participants to continuously evaluate the matrix of their products and the revenue generated from it in the past three to five years, set targets, and then look beyond for a long-term impact. Putting more emphasis on the R&D activities, he proposed that there are two ways to work: 1) To work with the academic institutions for the reason that there is the diversity of young minds and no preconceived notions, who can come up with very innovative ideas. We must tap that. 2) To work with the start-ups, because they also work differently and don’t have the baggage of existing customers, legacy products, and most importantly, they work on the venture money. IITGN Research Park provides a wonderful mechanism to work together with the academic and research organisations and a very good ecosystem for start-ups.”
The event, designed to enable and promote enhanced communication between industry leaders, the IITGN faculty and students to establish long-term collaboration and partnerships, had many highly interactive sessions and activities to provide the industry leaders an overview of the IITGN infrastructure and collaboration opportunities for industry-academia at IITGN Research Park.
During the day, some of the companies and start-ups shared their experiences on what IITGN offers to the industry. An open discussion and one-to-one interaction between IITGN faculty, industry representatives and partners invited various perspectives on R&D focus areas of different industries as well as industry’s expectations from IITGN.
IITGN faculty and students shared some of the cutting-edge technology capabilities of the institute through project presentations and product demonstrations. A few alumni of Invent@IITGN shared their experiences of being part of this unique programme in inventing which enabled them to invent a useful product and file for its patent in a mere six weeks of time. Industry participants were also taken for the visits of state-of-the-art laboratories, library and the Research Park site.
A parallel session for entrepreneurs and start-ups had an Open House with Mr Digvijay Singh, COO, Indian Angel Network (IAN), followed by pitching sessions, product demonstrations and networking among different stakeholders, and lectures by Mr Gopalakrishnan and Mr Ivaturi on Building scalable technology Startups and Pitfalls to avoid while looking for investments, respectively.
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