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Innovation in Mind,
Startups Pave way
for
PhDs
Nita
Sachan has an academic background that spans agriculture, pharmacology
and
cardiology. But unlike her family members, who are all scientists, she heads
strategy
and business development at Mapmygenome, a Hyderabad-based
molecular
diagnostics company.
A new
breed of super-specialised professionals previously not accommodated
by
traditional industries are entering the wider job market, thanks mainly to
startups.Professionals like Sachan, who have
PhDs or Masters in fields as
diverse
as theoretical physics, spectroscopy and linguistics, are being poached
from
university research centres to help startups increase their pace of
innovation
in
areas like artificial intelligence.
“India
is making an incredibly huge transition from `back-office hub' to
`innovation boiler room',“ said Shridhar
Marri, chief executive of Senseforth
Technologies,
which in the next two years plans to hire at least 30% of its
employees
from pure science backgrounds to work on natural language
processing.
“This transition will spawn a new breed of cross-fertilized pure
science
careers.“
With a
majority of India's technology startups trying to decode consumer
behaviour,
automate complex processes, analyse mountains of data, or make
computers
smarter, professionals with expertise in niche science fields have
come
to be n demand in ecommerce and enterprise product companies as well.
“In a
field like machine learning, we have hired some of the world's best
experts
-PhDs from Stanford and MIT,“ Flipkart's head of corporate development
Nishant
Verman said in an earlier conversation with ET. Ravi Vijayaraghavan,
VP and
head-analytics, and Mohit Kumar, a data scientist at Flipkart, are among
the
PhD holders in the firm.
For
several core science researchers and academics, startups have emerged as
a
dynamic alternative, allowing them to get out of the confines of universities
and
leapfrog their careers. “Working for a startup is rewarding because you get
to
wear multiple hats -from working on business strategy, development to
marketing,
communications as well as the commercial aspects of the scientific
research,“
said Sachan, who has a PhD in molecular biology and biochemistry
from
the University of Kentucky.
For
Smriti Singh, a research lead at Senseforth, the startup has presented her
with
better prospects than academia. The company helps enterprises by enabling
computers
make sense of customer complaints and resolve these quickly.
“I
could have eventually become a professor. But I could see myself getting a
smart
place in the tech sector,“ said Singh, who studied computational linguistics
at the
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
Hundreds
of startups, large and small, are scouting for computational linguists,
she
said. Recruitment firms said they are seeing more such professionals being
hired
by startups, even if they do not get specific requests for people with
experience
in research.
“The
job specialisation is so narrow that it can easily alert a competitor on the
company's
new area of research,“ said Aneesh Passi, cofounder of recruitment
firm
Basil Advisors. It's not always a cozy deal for researchers and academics
at
startups. For one, the salary of a senior software engineer will likely be
higher
than
that of a PhD degreeholder with equal experience.
Also,
“the patents are owned by the companies they work for, (but) they get a
lot of
recognition in the industry,“ said Prasanth Perugupalli, managing director
at
IMEC India, a Belgium-based nonprofit that is trying to digitise pathology
slides,
which requires bringing together imaging and analytics capabilities to
the
biology lab.
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Krithika
Krishnamurthy & Nirupama Venkataramanan
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ET5NOV15
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