IIT MADRAS IS INDIA'S STANFORD
Strong bonds between industry and academia are
critical for the emergence of a vibrant startup ecosystem. IIT Madras has taken
pioneering steps that are beginning to deeply influence startup growth and
innovativeness, and others are beginning to follow its lead
If you look at some of the more prominent
e-commerce and market place ventures of today be it Flip kart, Snapdeal,
Zomato, Quikr, Ola, or Housing you will find that many have founders who did
engineering degrees at IIT Delhi or IIT Mumbai.
But the future of the more technology focused
startups the kind that institutions like Stanford produce in droves may
actually be IIT Madras, and the phenomenal success of some companies like Zoho
may be early evidence of that. This has to do with the culture of technology
research and industry-academia interaction that the institution has fostered
for years, and which has touched a new high with a massive research facility
that was launched five years ago.
The IIT Madras Research Park was an idea conceptualized
by Ashok Jhunjhunwala, professor at the electrical engineering department of
IIT-M, and M S Ananth, the then dean of academic courses and later the director
of the institute, to create a bridge between innovations created in the
classroom and industry . It is spread across 1.2 million sq ft, houses almost
100 entities research companies, innovation arms of large corporates,
startups and incubators and has already facilitated filing of over 60
patents.
“We realized that the rewards of R&D are significantly
higher if we enable R&D personnel from industry to work jointly with our
faculty and students on new ideas,“ says Bhaskar Ramamurthi, director of IIT
Madras and a member of the board at the Research Park.
INNOVATIVE STARTUPS
The success of the ecosystem can be seen in the
quality and utility of the innova tions produced by its residents. Take Vortex
Engineering, which is working towards financial inclusion using disruptive ATM
technology. The company claims many firsts first biometric ATMs for MNREGA,
first ATMs to work without AC, and first commercially viable solar ATMs.
Narayanakumar R, the chief development officer of Vortex, is all praise for the
ecosystem. “Our research activities here have resulted in almost nine patents
for the cash technology used in our ATMs,“ he says.
Ather Energy is building a smart electric
scooter at the Park. Swayambhu Biologics is a biotech firm that uses a patented
microbial composting process that results in creation of nutrient-rich
biomanure along with the advantage of managing distillery effluents and helping
industries achieve zero discharge. IIT-M's Rural Technology Business Incubator
incubated Swayambhu in 2012 and gave them much needed resources, equipment and
space at the Research Park. Uniphore, incubated at IIT-M in 2008 and which has
filed six patents, has leveraged the institution's technical expertise to
develop Akeira, a virtual assistant like Apple's Siri. Akeira can be used on
any basic phone and its interactive feature keeps farmers informed of advisory
messages.
Startups say the presence of R&D divisions
of large companies in the same facility enables them to feed into their
expertise. TCS has an innovation lab at the Research Park. TCS CTO Ananth
Krishnan says the engagement model, the intellectual ambience, and proximity to
faculty and students have been a huge positive. “We also get an opportunity to
engage and mentor startups doing interesting work,“ he says.
The environment, though still in its nascent
stages, has striking similarities with that of Stanford, which has long had a
unique and powerful relationship with Silicon Valley. A study by Stanford
academics Charles Eesley and William Miller three years ago estimated that
Stanford alumni and faculty members had founded 39,900 companies since the
1930s, creating 5.4 million jobs and generating annual revenues of $2.7
trillion.Its students and alumni have founded companies like Hewlett-Packard,
Intel, Cisco to the more recent Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla,Netflix, Paypal,
YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat.
UNIQUE MODEL
IIT-M says it has differentiated the model to
suit the Indian context. Director Ramamurthi says the Research Park is perhaps
the only one that measures the extent of collaboration with clients through a
“credit system“. The system assigns points to clients for different joint
activities, ranging from joint patent development to supporting student
interns. “Unlike Stanford, where the research ecosystem is for
academia-industry linkages, while entrepreneurship development happens across the
board, IIT-M's facility has succeeded in combining research and entrepreneurial
elements in one ecosystem,“ says Rajan Srikanth, co-president of Keiretsu
Forum, an angel investor.
Nagaraja Prakasam, mentor in residence at the N
S Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at IIM-Bangalore, says the IIT-M
Research Park ecosystem is creating ventures of high technical quality that are
solving realworld problems, going beyond internet and mobile consumer ventures.
Prakasam is an investor in Uniphore and is in talks with several other ventures
for similar relationships. Shripathi Acharya, managing partner at seed funding
venture AngelPrime in Bengaluru, says he would advise startups to have a
presence at the Research Park for multiple reasons -professionalism that comes
with being present in such a location, the peer learning that happens at the
growth stage, and the visibility that it brings to their ventures.
The Research Park could soon get additional
muscle with the IIT Alumni Club proposing an `IIT Alumni Industry Interaction
Centre' at the facility. The centre hopes to help fledgling ventures in their
market penetration stage. “As alumni we want to enable this interaction,“ says
Suresh Kalpathi, president of the Club and chairman of Kalpathi Investments.
The biggest proof that the IIT-M model is
working is perhaps the fact that others are now looking at replicating
it.Devang Khakhar, the director of IIT Bombay, says his institution has set in
motion plans for a research park. “We have set up a committee to get it going,
land has been earmarked within the campus, and talks are on to garner support
from industrial stakeholders,“ he says.
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Sindhu Hariharan
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TOI22MAR15
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