Dr Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Director IITM Research Park speaks about the goals that would propel IITM Research Park in the coming years at the Turbocharged Tamil Nadu seminar organised by Industrial Economist.
If we go way back to 1950s, the Government of India at that time, set up five IITs. The goal for IITs was that it should be a cornerstone in building the industrial, scientific and technological edifice of the nation. But the question that sometimes needs to be asked is, did we fulfil this original mission? I will say no. That is because we are still importing every technology.
In the turn of century, many of us who understood this were faculty at IIT. We felt that enough is not done and we need a lot more industry and academia collaboration to develop. That is where the IIT Madras Research park and incubation center came up. The goal is to create a collaboration between innovation and entrepreneurship to address industry challenges.
250 startups in 10 years…
To help startups, we felt that we should also be like a startup. For that, apart from the Rs 100 crore grant that we got, we borrowed about Rs 400 crore from banks to build this whole campus. A specific condition of this place is that it is not for mere real estate, the company that comes here must do R&D. In fact, we went and created a system that for every 1000 square feet, the companies must do 150 credits every year, otherwise, they will have to move out. This helped develop industry-academia interaction. At the same time we set up our incubation center. We have created 250 startups in 10 years, creating an unique record. 85 per cent of our companies are doing well and have a value of Rs 30,000 crore.
The vision for future
The success of this initiative is that we are independent with a strong board that pushes us forward. Our board said, “In ten years you have done a great work which we all didn’t believe would be possible. But what will you do for the next ten years?” So now we have set ourselves a few goals to work to. The first is to take 30 to 50 products developed from R&D done in India to scale and commercialization.
But to continue with our incubation model, we have tied up with 10 institutions in Tier 2 and 3 cities. This has created an excitement in these places. This excitement helps the students to understand that entrepreneurship is a career option and if at least 5 – 10 per cent are interested, we encourage them to build things. Building things imparts more knowledge than lecture sessions. At the same time, it is necessary to teach them success and failures are same.
There were two young kids, 22-year-old graduates working in my lab. Later they tried with a start up in med tech area. After several failures, one day, they said they were ready. Through the research park we incubated them and also bought 400 shares for Rs 4000. A month back, I got a mail which said that they were in the fourth round of investment and the investors were asking to retire early investors. They wanted to buy back the shares and said that for the Rs 4000, that we gave we will get back Rs 1417.6 lakh. I was shocked seeing this. This is what entrepreneurs can do. They create value. One thing that we stress upon with the startups is be compliant. Do everything right and succeed. If you fail, you fall. Get up again next morning and start again. You fall down again. Again, get up. This is the first lesson that we teach.
Create top world class engineers
Goal number three, we are now graduating a million engineers, but you know if I look at Indian industry, the best people are not the best in the world, not in top 1 to 2 per cent. We employ around 1500 people and this is expected to increase to 2500. We are working to make 500 of them the world’s best engineer at the top 2 per cent. We will motivate them, reignite their dream, push them, give them the challenging environment and let them become the top 2 per cent engineers in the world. If we do this, others will also do and our industry will be full of top-class engineers.
Create 5 sectors that produce world class products…
Goal number four. There are very few areas that India is known to be the amongst the world’s best. We are trying to become the world best in five areas. The first area that we chose was Net Zero. How do you drive India to become net zero, at least can we be the number one two or three in the world doing that? Because it’s such an important problem for the whole world, for India, particularly the poorest. We already saw it in Chennai last in November, when the rains took place a little heavier than usual, people were taking boats to come out from their homes. And the poorest were even more affected.
Area number two, we selected assistive technology, technology for people with disabilities. We have such a large number of engineers. We need to put 50,000 people to build devices which are the world’s best for people with handicap. Can we do that, not just for India for the world.
The third area is FinTech, financial technology. 85 per cent of India’s household has income less than Rs 25,000 per month. No one does FinTech for them. And therefore, we defined FinTech for inclusion. And we are lucky when we started looking at this problem, we found some of the best FinTech for inclusion work is going on at IIT Madras Research Park.
Many people say that things cannot be done, but things get done when we believe in it and do whatever is possible to get there. It doesn’t matter if you fail, particularly if the goal is for the society, for the nation, and not necessarily only for yourself. There is a famous Hindi film dialogue that says, when you really want something, and from the deep of your heart. Then the whole universe will conspire to get you there. I believe in this and then as said in Bhagavad Gita, do your task and then we have our own karmas.
Watch the entire video of Dr Ashok Jhunjhunwala speak at the session here.
