a multi stakeholder workshop on Bridging Academia – Industry Gap: A Consultation to Create Collaborative Platform between 10 am – 1.00 pm at KLMDC Conference Hall on February 3, 2010.

As you are aware, www.techpedia.in has tried to map the mind of technological youth of India.  So far, summaries of 104,000 final year engineering projects by more than 300,000 students from 500 plus colleges have been pooled at www.techpedia.in, a portal supported by SRISTI (Society for Research and Institutions for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions).  But for a small support from DST for the first 5000 projects, the entire initiative has become possible because of extraordinary voluntary contribution of the students of SVNIT, Surat through SRISTI.   Mr. Hiranmay Mahanta and his team have performed almost a miracle by pooling more 100,000 projects in six months.  For more than six years, I had been trying but I could not do it.  The major purpose is to build www.techpedia.in as a national platform for encouraging students to work on the real life problem of MSME and other industries besides informal sector and grassroots innovators. At the same time, we want to get outstanding projects of the students to convert them into product every year.  We should not forget that the project for which Pranav Mistry at MIT ( who will be actively involved with www.techpedia.in)  is getting global recognition was started when he was a student here in ahmedabad in a local engineering college but no body paid attention to him then.

The key challenges facing the portal are:

INDUSTRY:

a.                Mobilising industrially defined projects [IDP] to help the students to work on real life problems.

b.                Making workshop/ labs in the organized sector available to students to pursue complex projects in cases when such facilities might not exist in the respective colleges.

c.                Mentoring students’ defined projects ( SDP) where industry may have interest in the potential solution or where problems are of social importance.

d.                Making portal self-reliant by contributing CSR resources for the purpose.

e.                Honouring the faculty who guide most outstanding projects every year thereby creating role models.

f.                 Strengthening the capacity of students in polytechnics and small engineering colleges having committed teachers.

g.                Reserving some space in every national and state level industrial expo for display outstanding projects by students without any cost to them, in fact they should be supported by state agencies or industry associations for making good quality prototypes for display.

ACADEMIA:

a.                Encouraging students to visit industries, particularly the small ones to benchmark their technical problems, some of which may lend themselves to project mode of solution.

b.                Maintaining time bound commitments through monthly monitoring of industries sponsored or defined projects.

c.                Encouraging students to work in the workshops/labs round the clock by modifying administrative rules.

d.                Developing a framework for licensing student project reports to industry protecting the IPRs of the students at mutually agreed terms.

e.                Developing a framework for IP protected IDPs.

f.                 Encouraging students to take up unsolved societal technical problems, particularly affecting women for solving them in a time bound manner.

g.                Coordination with Honey Bee Network and NIF to pick up grassroots innovations for augmentation through the www.techpedia.inplatform.

h.                Encouraging students to set up SCAI [Student Club for Augmenting Innovations] supported by NIF (National Innovation Foundation)

i.                 Encouraging collaboration between technology, management, law, design and other disciplines to create knowledge network in strategic areas

MENTORING:

a.                Identifying serving and retired senior professionals, industry experts, academicians to mentor student projects within or across technical colleges to promote  originality and enhance the innovation quotient of higher education .

b.                Encouraging innovation and originality by identifying top five or top ten most innovative projects in various disciplines or sub disciplines.

c.                Help judge entries for SRISTI Yuva Yantriki awards for the most creative and socially useful projects.

d.                Mentoring inter-institutional collaborations where projects brought to some stage of development in one college are taken up under kho-khomodel under another institute for further development.

e.                To support students to put their technologies under open source, GPL or IP protected domains. However, www.techpedia.in will consciously strive to expand public domain for making small scale industries and rural and urban entrepreneurs self reliant

f.                 Encourage students to take up projects recognized through Ignite contests among school children through NIF

g.                Identify new hotspots of creativity in relatively small places and institutions to encourage distributed model of knowledge and innovation management

FINANCIAL SELF-RELIANCE PORTAL AND MANAGEMENT TEAM

Identifying transparent and flexible ways for strengthening the platform for long term pooling of projects and sourcing problems worldwide for making www.techpedia.in a global hub for sustainable, frugal and affordable solution. We have no external funding for this activity and this is completely a voluntary activity and we intend to keep it voluntary  in future also.

Anil K Gupta