siliconindia | | July 20188mong the many changes that businesses have seen in last decade are so, one change is the way or-ganizations are approaching towards technologi-cal problems. The new product development and innovation management practices have evolved significantly and industries are embracing best practices from outside their boundary walls. Open Innova-tion practice has become an integral part of R&D ecosystem across the world. Chesbrough had defined Open innovation as "the use of purposive inflows & outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation and expand the market for ex-ternal use of innovation". This approach of looking beyond the boundary walls of own organization and tapping the best minds to work together has been very effective. It is not like that industry has not innovated with closed model of innovation in past, however, the business dynam-ics have changed over a period of time. The globalization has resulted in wide spread of technology clusters and Asian jurisdictions have made their presence felt in terms of inno-vation capabilities. This has been further augmented by the fact that innovation cycle across industries has shortened, cost of NPD has increased considerably and technologies have become highly inter disciplined. More importantly, academia has come forward strongly to work on indus-try-related problems. Indian Government has also pushed Industry academia partnership strongly and a number of government funded research programs (such as Uchhatar Avishkar Yojana (UAY), Global Innovation & Technolo-gy Alliance (GITA), IMPacting Research Innovation and Technology (IMPRINT)) have mandatory requirements of having established industry linkage and industry participa-tion. All these factors have led industries to think about new, efficient and cost-effective business models of innovating and have resulted in growth of collaboration opportunities. Organizations no longer believe that `Doing It Yourself' is the best approach for every technological problem. It is not critical that technology solutions to originate from you to make profit out of it.Type of Research CollaborationsThe figure below briefly describes the types of research col-laborations which are prevalent among the industries. The collaborations become more and more strategic in nature as we move-up in the pyramid and number may also be less. Similarly, the number of tactical and transactional based (mostly project oriented) will be more at the bottom.Project Basis: Advantages· Best in the field can be tapped· No long term commitment if results not encouragingIN MY opinionBy Munish Sudan, Head - IP & External Research Collaboration, Tata SteelA subsidiary of the TATA Group, TATA Steel is a multinational steel manufacturing company boasting of having a crude steel production capacity of nearly 30 million tons per annum. It is headquartered in Mumbai and employs over 80,000 people across five continents in nearly 50 countries.COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH IS NEW APPROACH OF INNOVATING IN THE FAST EVOLVING WORLDA
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