“Innovation and entrepreneurship development in institutions of higher education” – A critical analysis

Background

Though the need for Innovation and the wave of entrepreneurial spring is seen across the world, we in India and specifically in Kerala, were more interested due to a variety of factors. The country at large and the state had realised the importance of value creation and the need to move up the value chain in the service/productive sectors that had seen growth over the last 2 decades. The country registered itself as a fast-growing economy on the might of the consistent growth of close to 20% in the sectors like IT services, however the industry had realised that the curve was maturing off and there were other cheaper destinations and automated processes that were quickly killing its competitive advantage. The emphasis on product focus and the push to manufacture in the country gained momentum due to this realisation. but these demanded a high degree of varied skills and large numbers of such skilled labour. Further the investments and the general ecosystem that was required was also equally demanding. Setting up all these was an uphill task for sure.

The State of Kerala had its own peculiar issues to add on to the national agenda viz., an ageing population , high Skilled workforce migration , declining trends of the remittance economy and so on. The question was how to retain the skilled youth population in the state with avenues to exhibit their energy , enthusiasm and expertise and how to catch the next bus ( we often have this usage like the last bus to development and so on , many last buses have come , but this time the need to be on some bus was high)

Initiatives attempted 

The national level interventions were kick-started by DST  in setting up Academic incubators under their TBI scheme and this was the time the state got its first Non Academic incubator in Technopark TBI , which was later developed into the Kerala StartUP  Mission. However the aspirations of a Silicon valley culture , IP based startups and Campus research resulting in Unicorns were still a far cry. At a National level good examples which were initiated like the IIT Chennai research park, resembling a Stanford research and innovation ecosystem.

Kerala attempted its own interventions through the setting up of the TTBI, Trest Research park etc., but it was years of struggle and evolution before these institutions even got noticed at the national level. The Higher education institutions here were inherently rigid and though the state had democratised education and ensured compulsory schooling etc we were short of any centres of excellence other than the top-notch engineering colleges who were focused on academics alone.

KSUM: As mentioned earlier the DST approved TBI which was under Technopark was raised to the level of a Nodal agency of the state with the Chief Minister as its Chairman. The organisation was later rebranded as KSUM and multiple interventions were attempted to create an environment congenial for innovation and Entrepreneurship. 

1. IEDC :This was an attempt to catch them young while at College, though the focus was on undergraduate courses , the idea was to let students tinker with devices and technologies while in college and also to attempt the pursuit of their venture efforts . The philosophy was that, while the students are still in college the time is ideal for such experimentation and entrepreneurial attempts because even if they fail they would still have an original academic project ”. The Innovation entrepreneurship Development Cells (IEDCs) set up in colleges were an avenue for the Teachers to take up a mentoring role and engage with students outside the curriculum , for the students this was an opportunity to try out their innovative ideas and learn while doing. This became a 200+ college network and was achieved by the full cooperation of faculty who acted as nodal officers. The initiative triggered the interest in entrepreneurship and passion for learning new technologies in student communities. The student communities thus formed broke the barriers of region, institution etc and were more connected on the basis of Technology or sectoral interest. However there are a few systemic rigidities which had to be tackled like the institutions did not initially recognise the value of work by these nodal faculty and hence it became an additional burden on these faculty for coordinating /mentoring the students. For students the system did not recognise their work in the IEDC/startup as part of their academic activities or provide credits for such effort . 
2. Fablabs: Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Media Lab had developed the concept of FabLabs , which are a collection of machines  enabling rapid prototyping. These tools were made available to the colleges in a miniature version by setting up 20 minimum fab labs across the state . The students of the state got an opportunity to lay their hands on technology development like the 3D printers, Laser cutters etc and were connected to the Fab foundation and its network . The exposure to the international community and the latest technologies created a fresh drive among students and especially the hardware sector . An impetus was given to the maker culture in the state and also a general impact can be noticed in the hardware ecosystem. The academic community however was reluctant to adopt these labs and activities into its existing system nor were they willing to open up their college labs to address a public need or for a maker from outside. 
3. Innovation Platform:  Creation of an Innovation platform was another thought process at KSUM where in the exuberance of youth had to meet the expertise of the experienced and the financial might of the funders to meet the scaling needs of start-ups and the intellectual property of the innovators to meet the commercial acumen of the corporates.  This sprung from the idea that though we attribute the cause of  a lot of disruptive innovations to Serendipity , one should also acknowledge that the environment for such accidents to turn into innovations were also critical for their successes.  Serendipity and beyond was a theme we worked on and this led to the thinking of unrelated sectors and heterogeneous startups  in terms of stages, sectors etc being brought together to work together in anticipation of cross pollination and guided collisions of ideas. This platform took the shape of a physical as well as a virtual space . The physical space being  the Technology Innovation Zone ,TIZ – a melting pot of multiple sectors and technologies and An online platform ( currently called as RINK)

Faculty involvement: Though our system does not explicitly restrict any faculty from becoming a Director in a startup or starting one of their own , yet the faculty are reluctant and seek a formal direction in this regard to do so. This is when the University provisions allow consultancy work to be taken up by individuals through the institution or even independently , just that they have to follow certain norms. The institutions of higher education need to involve, engage and participate in these initiatives and recognise their contributions to these as part of their curriculum as the learning by students in these initiatives would be transformative.

Trest Research Park: The experience of working with KSUM led to a realization that the students and faculty need to be hands-on into the latest tools and technologies and also in a shared platform with the Industry, if one was to dream of any innovation in the technology  area. 

1. Connections were established with technology companies, EV manufacturers and service providers and an EV CoE was established where the partner would deploy resources to handhold the researchers and start-ups to use the technology solutions. A EV testing lab and NABL accredited lab etc were in the plan.  Covid and general inertia to engage in a beyond curriculum effort and a lot more extraneous reasons saw that the CoE could not be fully utilised. Partnerships with ANSYS, Altire, etc and R&D companies like Entuple and research tie ups with BEL, KDISC , DST etc were done .
2. The works done at ICFOSS initially on the Open hardware lab and a possible connection to Kerala’s own laptop ‘COCONICS’ led to the idea of creating capacity in the designing and testing of semiconductor chips. Tieups with Open silica , a SiFi company , Westghats a home grown company in the field of Design and development through a RISKV CoE. The design  of a RISK V processor for an EV application is being attempted in the Research park but it needs to be supported by the academia and researchers should be allowed to associate and contribute .

The above initiatives gave a lot of insights into how our Higher education system responds to initiatives like this especially in collaboration with Industry and how the academic community responds or is motivated to take lead in such attempts 

System Review

 Let us now attempt to look at a few  hard truths of the system  that constrain us from achieving the intentions. There are 3 distinct factors that play a critical role in this system , Viz.,

• Complacency

“If someone were to ask me what is the single-biggest issue facing higher education in this country right now — people will say innovation, they would say financial issues and so forth. I think the biggest issue facing higher education right now is complacency,” West Virginia University president Gordon Gee

“The more we get regulated, the more complacent we are going to be and the less curiosity we are going to have.”

 “What blocks our path is a systemic complacency” , this is true for academic systems all around the world but essentially true for our system . To understand this in detail let us start by looking at the factors triggering this complacency, these are Compliance Conformity & Cordoning  

Compliance and conformity: These are the factors highlighted by Mr Gordon as key contributors to complacency. When we map it to our system it can be seen that we are on a heavily regulated education system and the system is so rigid that it resists even incremental changes very vehemently. These regulations, as Mr Gordon stated, have killed our curiosity and contributed to systemic complacency. The regulations demand compliance to rules and work with matrices which are being followed by rule rather than in spirit. We are converting all shapes to square pegs to fit into a square hole we have built.

The lobbying groups formed as part of the academic system ensures that any different or divergent voice is compelled to conform to their ‘Norm’ . The conformists occupy most of the key advisory groups as these are allocated based on affiliations and affinity and they ensure conformity through peer pressure. One is reminded of the *Solomon Asch experiment where you are forced to make choices against your own thought process by the pressure to conform to the group. One will come across the universal statements of  “ this is how it has been done”, this is how we do here’ if you are deviating you have a special interest/ ulterior motive and so on.  Let us be reminded that if we do the same things , the same way we will only get the same results to achieve something different you need to attempt something different.

The last of the three factors to systemic complacency and the one is typical to our country and specifically the state is “ Cordoning “. My experiences with initiatives in the state made me confront the following statements , “ Private industries to operate within our lab? Students of Private colleges?, faculty of other colleges ?  “ not inside campus” , not after office hours” so on and so forth . These are classic examples of cordoning off the research initiatives to keep it within your fold not by virtue of competency but sheer contingency and this definitely leads to complacency . There are very lethal coercive threats (veiled and direct) like vigilance complaints, association referendum etc that will come your way. A brilliant example of compliance and cordoning is the existing rule in one of our Universities  that no Self financing/Private institutions can be research centres, reason quoted , “ our statute doesn’t allow it . But then haven’t you amended your statute ever? come on, the Indian constitution is amended so many times and this statute seems to have been written even before that. The cordoning off here enables a handful of  faculty in the departments, to become the only guides for research of the respective subject and this chokes any research in that field. 

•  Competency

We, as a society, beat our chest on the democratisation, universalisation, standardisation and centralisation of the education system, right from the federal to the state level. These are good to an extent in ensuring an equitable opportunity for formal education to all, but one needs to understand that these principles are not quite valid for higher education especially in the context of research excellence, innovation, and entrepreneurship. There could be many socialistic arguments that one would be itching to throw at such a comment but let us see the rationale of such a comment.

Ideally, Centres of Excellence are hubs of specialisations where focussed efforts are coordinated to ensure that there is path breaking research on a subject/area and there is a dedicated team with a plan to deliver an outcome/output. These are the places where we will consolidate our scarce resources be it human skill, infrastructure, funding and all forms of support . The selection to these centres should be the prerogative of the research head, who in turn should be an established profile in that particular area at least at a national level. The principal researcher /guide should have the right to choose his researcher, the focus of the research , the rigour , the result and so on. The commercialisation of research outcomes will be an outcome of rigorous and high end research and experimentation and this cannot be a ‘good to be in  place’ for all.

Drawing an analogy to the identification of a sports talent at an early age, they do not have a portfolio to show but only a basic capability, an aptitude and a few subjective measures which the respective coach finds in them. And how do we promote them, in a gradual step by step process of reinforcing achievements. 

Now let us switch to the current situation in institutions of higher education. We spread the limited physical resources thin over a range of institutions and the considerations are regionalism, categories of students, constituencies, democratic distribution etc. 

• The process is centralised, standardised and in a not so flexible calendar.   
• The process of identification is universal and open, 
• The process of research is methodology oriented rather than outcome oriented. 

Some of the glaring issues are , if there is any point in testing the language capabilities of a technology scientist or his/her interpersonal communication or knowledge on a wide range of topics of no relevance to the research subject. A scientist or specialist is focussing more and more into less and less things, why should one test the researcher’s ignorance in a variety of other subjects than look into his passion and depth in his areas of research. We do so because the standardized test and mass drives require a process of selection/screening which should be easily handled and more importantly looks objective in a public scrutiny. 

We cannot do incremental modifications in the current system in higher education and expect  transformation of the innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem. It’s like believing in the evolution of the incandescent bulb through an incremental improvement of the candle or the lantern. There needs to be a paradigm shift and the entire gamut of activities need to be restructured simultaneously, right from the philosophy to the curriculum to the pedagogy/process to the selection of candidates to the result/Exit criteria.

One needs to understand that Excellence in a system is like spikes, you cannot universalise and democratise excellence and the process to excellence cannot be standardised and centralised. Even the best socialists’ systems follow a certain level of hierarchy and that is the minimum practical reality one needs to open ones eyes to. Flattening the possible spikes of excellence in the name of the utopian philosophies will lead to a plateau of mediocrity.

The latest rule of the higher education institutions states that “Research can be guided only by a regular faculty of a research centre in a university and even faculty can do it only till he or she retires”. These are rules by central agencies who in their wisdom might be trying to arrest some malpractices, information on which they alone may have access to . But what we have done here is ,” instead of strengthening the decentralised process of ensuring the process and quality of the program we tend to cut the whole program to a controllable standardised centralised mechanism” . Industry experts, who have years of experience in latest technology will not be able to guide a research even if they acquire the necessary qualification, nor would a Sr faculty good in research continue his or her good work post retirement . This brings us to a question of when does the intellect retire? .  Jobs need retirement to give opportunity to another but I don’t think that applies to research, innovation or entrepreneurship. These rules are loved by the existing coccus as it confines the power of research and experimentation through them only

Academic bodies be it research councils, Board of studies etc are concerned are filled up by “regular” research guides with no or limited exposure/participation of Industry. Industry participation today is sought for a check box ticking and PR perspective but when it comes to following their directions or inputs the conformity experiment sets in.

• Commercialisation

The commercialisation of academic research is a hard nut yet to be cracked by the system . This is not to overlook the products that have come out of institutions but to wat extent we have institutionalised the process is the question. The major reasons of Academic research and commercial successes are way apart are due some or all of the following 

1. Researchers have different motives/perspectives in universities and Industry 
2. The assessment of the business or commercial potential of a research is often not done
3. The industry and investors tend to undermine the efforts at academic levels due to non visibility or lack of information 
4. Implementing of the research findings ( translational research)  is required to bridge the big gap between theory and practice; 
5. Academic researchers lack understanding of the research commercialization process
6. Lack of funding at the basic and translational research levels ; 
7. Lack of robust framework for research commercialization in universities and research Institutions

There are IP s   waiting for takers in the research centers and universities and real life problems or commercial potential begging for an innovative solution. The paradox is evident when one looks at the long untouched list of the “technologies for transfer” in websites of all Academic/Research  Institutions and at the same time the needs of startups and Industry for tech breakthroughs are not addressed.

Some of the Key impediments to the technology commercialisation in the Academic field  is  the suspicion and scepticism associated with Private sector ,  profitability and entrepreneurship. As indicated earlier education sector being strictly controlled by Governments has created a clear distancing of the Private sector and in turn the commercialisation opportunities. The opportunity to extract value from one’s research outcomes is not a mandate or a pursuit of academic researchers as they are more comfortable in the process driven research than outcome driven research . The Academic researcher prefers to work on grants trickling down by the Government framework than do commercial research with a commitment of outcomes and returns . The presentation of research as a pursuit of knowledge and the conformist rules of looking down on commercially driven research has pulled us back many fold. The conversion of research outcomes to entrepreneurial ventures and faculty being part of such ventures are hard to find here. In fact there in no rule restricting the faculty from taking a directorship in a startup or in a company or starting his or her own venture but this is never attempted due to the earlier mentioned fear of compliance , conformist and cordoning off framework 

A paradigm shift 

The whole paradigm of higher education needs a revamp in mindset, attitude and outcomes, what we need to be attempting in this system could be related to changes in Curriculum, Pedagogy and Evaluation methods based on the learner, and more distributed.

Today you are allowed to pursue higher education in different languages but the learning style of the individual is still not considered . I cannot pursue a higher degree by research, entrepreneurial attempt or by virtue of an innovation. I cannot show an output that is a manifestation of all the theories in a particular subject and claim a degree in that subject. The problem again is the philosophy , you need to be taught immaterial of whether you already know it or not. There are avenues of learning today beyond which classes by MOOCS are a regulated commodity, credit mapping of the MOOC to the curriculum is a nightmare.

We are still in the memory based exams and the learning process is still exam focussed  this does not help innovation . Impact index of innovation on a matrix of social relevance and commercial success would be a good indicator than simpler matrices like no of papers published, incremental or modifications on existing concepts and designs filed for IPs , etc.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship mindset has to be built into the education system at least at the Higher education level and the whole system has to be reoriented towards identifying sparks and nurturing them into stars , We may need to focus on certain identified areas and build infrastructure , both hard and soft, around them rather than spread it thin over a large number of areas or persons.