Growing industry-academia cooperation
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| Vijaya Deshmukh |
In the changed economic environment, creating synergetic partnerships between industry and technical education institutions has become a vital necessity for improving quality and cost-competitiveness. Institutions need to constantly upgrade their course curriculums and teaching methodologies while simultaneously training human resources for the present and future requirements of industry. Constant upgradation of infrastructure facilities and continuous improvement of faculty skill sets are other important focus areas for institutions. Such institutional-industry interaction needs to be urgently encouraged because industry requires well-qualified and industry-ready human resources to meet the challenges of global competitiveness, especially flowing from technological change. Frequent upgradation and modernisation of institutional infrastructure has become a major problem because of shrinking of technology cycles and rapid reduction in product lifespans. Therefore product innovation and process modernisation is necessary within industry which needs all the help it can get from academia.
Fortunately some forward-looking technology institutes have reached out in right earnest to industry. For instance at IIT-Bombay, the Industrial Research & Consultancy Centre (IRCC) manages all externally funded research and development projects with industry and facilitates the R&D interaction of every faculty with external agencies — both national and international. Moreover it supervises intellectual property protection and technology transfers, financial matters and recruitment of research scientists and engineers to work on funded projects.
Likewise the Regional Engineering College, Durgapur maintains regular and mutually beneficial interaction with industry. The college’s engineering departments render testing and consultancy services to corporates and firms, and faculty members work with the R&D departments of companies. An Industry-Institute Interaction Cell has been set up in the college to supervise such activities. As a result there are healthy exchanges between the institute and industry experts who regularly visit the college to deliver guest lectures and share best practices with teachers. Four state-of-the-art laboratories for materials testing and system analysis, civil engineering testing, environmental, energy studies have been set-up in the college under the Centre of Excellence Scheme of the Union government.
Confronted with the prospect of a wide gap between workplace realities and outdated/ obsolete institutional curriculums, several IT industry heavyweights are aggressively entering technical institutes to prepare students ahead of taking them on their rolls. Ex facie these interventions seem like mere training interventions for a couple of hundred trainee recruits. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find that companies are engaging in a plethora of activities like faculty development, courseware redesign and live projects on campuses to bridge the workplace-campus gap.
For instance the Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras have jointly set up an Academic Centre of Excellence and a user-oriented M.Tech programme in computational engineering at IIT-M. Initially meant for the captive training of TCS employees, the new programme seeks to prepare the ground for the future in the realm of ‘computation engineering’ — combining the latest in computation technology with the needs of mechanical, civil or structural engineering industries.
TCS had also taken its learning programmes to schools, through a ‘schoolnet’ project. This initiative attracted considerable support and encouragement in Bangalore last year and will soon be extended to other states. The defining characteristic of this programme is that it will not merely introduce computers to students but help them use computers to study other subjects, including mathematics and geography. These pioneer IT-industry initiatives have set a trend. Since then IT companies including Cognizant, Wipro, Satyam, have tied up with several colleges where they interact closely with students and faculty on specific industry needs. This collaboration helps reduce time for deploying recruits into projects and also enhances their quality.
This growing interaction between technical institutions and industry is entirely beneficial. It will greatly influence engineering curriculums, provide early exposure of industry workplaces to engineering students, and facilitate smooth induction of young graduate engineers into companies across the country.
But inevitably there are hurdles which prevent the accelerated replication of these pioneer industry-academia initiatives. Among them lack of faculty initiative, insufficient incentives to faculty and too many rules about utilisation of the incomes generated by R&D collaboration and consultancy assignments. Greater interaction between the heads of institutions and industry on a regular basis is required to smooth the way.
(Dr. Vijaya Deshmukh is assistant registrar at IIT-Kanpur and registrar designate at NID, Ahmedabad)