IITGN and Elsevier, a global information analytics company, jointly organised a Research Connect Forum at the institute today on the theme of ‘Research Collaboration and its Impact on Innovation and Economic Development’.
The one-day conference brought together more than 75 leading academicians, industry representatives and research administrators from the state and South-Asia region to explore and deliberate on ways to promote research and research collaborations between academics and industry. Representatives from State Higher Education Council, Gujarat Council of Science & Technology (GUJCOST), leading universities, institutes, research organisations and Elsevier considered long-term research management efforts, strategies and best practices.
Prof Sudhir K Jain, director, IITGN emphasised the correlation between research collaboration, innovation and economic development: “In the 21st century, economic development will not be based on who has more minerals or natural resources but on who will do more research, more innovation, and build technologies and solutions. We, as a country, need to understand that to be independent in the true sense.”
“The next level in innovation is to actually solve problems. We must change our mindset to defining research not only as publishing but also through which you actually make a difference in people’s lives. Research cannot happen in isolation. The best of the institutes/universities in the world work in collaboration. We need to share ideas, facilities and resources for research which help academic institutions to grow our market and that is what IITGN does,” he added.
Dr Narottam Sahoo, Advisor & Member Secretary, GUJCOST introduced the participants to the Science, Technology & Innovation Policy of Gujarat and various opportunities for support from GUJCOST. “Under this policy, we have made a provision that every line department in the state government should imbibe the culture of research. One per cent of the money from their annual budget should go into their internal research.” He encouraged faculty and researchers to come forward to submit their proposals in various areas of research, to innovate and develop technology solutions for common people’s problems.
Speaking on capitalising on institutional data assets, Mr Adam Jia Kang Goh, Regional Manager, Pure (Elsevier) said, “There are four broad categories of data assets i.e. 1) talent, 2) research output and project metadata, 3) research data, and 4) infrastructure. Research data management trend is growing very fast worldwide because of the increasing focus on data requirements.” He also talked about the challenges of dealing with data storage and streamlining data systems. “We need to have clean, connected data as it serves as the foundation for capitalising on the institution’s data assets,” he concluded.
Dr Anders Karlsson, Vice President of Global Strategic Networks at Elsevier, shared insights from a joint World Bank-Elsevier report on research trends across South Asia. South Asia accounts for only 5.3 per cent of the world’s scholarly output and India dominates with 88 per cent of the output from the region. But, the proportion of papers resulting from international collaborations within the South-Asia region was just 0.15 per cent, he said. “Greater academic and scientific collaboration between South-Asian countries could increase the region’s scholarly output and enhance its global citation impact,” according to the report.
The forum discussed topics viz. evolving expectations for universities, research collaboration, artificial intelligence in research and innovation, importance of research data in economic development and university rankings, strategies and practices to build a world-class research university, industry-academic collaboration, IPR in research and innovation, etc.
