From Academia, with Love Behold the turtle, he makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.

Bruce Levin An important theme that often does rounds in academia, industry, numerous committees and meetings is why academia-industry interactions, including that vital issue of technology transfer, are either at lower than the desired intensity level, or happening very slowly or are even non- existent! The problem is clear and immediate, its desirability is contested by none, and yet its solutions are often mired in the long sermons to both the industry and academia buried in the reports never twice visited! For what these may be worth, here are my 2-bit, 1-D thoughts on the issue, which is admittedly a complex matter with its roots, shoots and branches that cover a wide scale from education to our mindsets to the way we do business. How do successful universities around the globe do it? For one, it would be very unrealistic to expect a professor to raise resources for research, generate new ideas and micro-manage the research, guide students, write papers, keep accounts (!), teach effectively, go to the conferences and meetings, do administration and then also do significant technology development and transfer. The latter implies chasing many companies and people, who have a limited interest often only in a fully developed technology or product off the shelf, and to further convince the industry about the economy of scale and the market for it! A professor with a readymade technology available on the go is rare and this path to the tech transfer simply does not and will not happen in sufficiently large measures. Further, it is equally unrealistic for an industrial scientist or engineer to be enthused simply by the sparkle of ideas, without a clear appreciation of how it might fit in the commercial scheme of things. This coupled often with a lack of awareness about the latest technology directions, and the low priority often accorded to real R&D by many of our industries, may hamper a meaningful academia-industry exchange. A further impediment is the eternal conflict between the activity of new knowledge generation and the need for a time-trusted robust technology with a clear commercial potential, but requiring no new scientifically challenging inputs. However, such a dialogue leading to concrete gains can happen most naturally and efficiently when we have a streamlined system of student driven startups, which take

potentially industry relevant ideas from academic laboratories, get funding (including from industries), translate them to the well-identified applications and develop near-tothe-market prototypes. Technology transfer is too important an activity to be left to the professors alone, but requires dedicated systems interfacing the universities and industry with the sole mission of translating the common interests and needs. What our universities lack foremost are the startups that form the most natural interface between the industry and academia. The strength of a composite material is often only as good as the adhesive strength of its buried interfaces, bolstering of which requires an additional layer serving as the twilight zones of compatibility between the two otherwise incompatible materials. Startups can and do serve the role of this compatibility layer by having a shared nomenclature and concerns between the academia and industry and by harmonizing the longer term vision of the academic research with the immediacy of the industrial goals and by tempering sometimes unrealistic expectations on both sides. The reasons for the lack of startup culture are many; starting from the school (read coaching) and university education that emphasize a fragmented knowledge base catering to routine examinations rather than innovation, risk-taking, entrepreneurship, effective communication and even common sense! Then there is always the hankering after the so called job-security and the lack of professional confidence, not helped in the least by the prevalent model of education, that prevents most students with a middle-class background to explore other options. From my own experience, I have found students most eager to plunge into starting a startup when a reasonable baseline earnings or salary could be guaranteed for the first couple of years to stabilize the venture. While there are now several government supported schemes that go halfway to that end, participation of target industries at an early stage would be a very welcome move. The benefit to the industry will be leveraging of enormous intellectual and infrastructural resources and manpower at the disposal of our universities at a lower cost than in the in-house industrial R&D (when it exists) plus access to state-of-the-art in a technology area. Venture capital in India is rather scarce. The government and industry would thus have to partner much more. A partial model is Stanfords investing in student startups like a VC (http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/04/stanford-universityis-going-to-invest-in-student-startups-like-a-vc-firm/). Since nothing succeeds like

success, we need a critical mass of successful startups as the role models for the next gen. Perhaps some of the support by the research funding agencies like the DST, DBT, CSIR, etc ought to be earmarked for the projects that also incubate a student stratup or have clear plans for one. The time for the wakeup call is now already past. It can continue to be business as usual, without the new shimmers of optimism, excitement and opportunities for our young engineers, and at a great cost to the technology readiness of our nation. On the other hand, many a splendid opportunities wait in the middle-of-the-way synthesis of the extreme aspirations symbolized by the academic and industrial R&Ds.

Ashutosh Sharma