siliconindia | | July 20189by industry. Due to a variety of stu-dents, projects of different complexity can be done in institute. For example, an undergraduate student project could be implementation oriented engineer-ing project, while research oriented projects can be taken by PhD students and graduate students. On top of this, academic institute can hire staff to work specifically on the problems/pro-jects given by industry. Involvement of industry can be at different levels. One possibility is to jointly supervise the project. This way there can be tight control of both par-ties over the schedule, implementation, deliverables and so on. Other possibil-ity is, industry partner only gives the initial requirements and required deliv-erables. In this case, student is mainly supervised by institute faculty, while the industry checks the progress at reg-ular intervals. In either case it is a win-win situation for both, industry as well as academic partner. Industry partner will be able to utilize theoretical under-standing of the academic partner, while academic partner will understand the dynamics and requirement of industry. ConsultancyConsultancy is another opportunity for industry to engage faculty mem-bers. In consultancy, academic partner provides advice and consultation for the work being done at the industry. It may also involve implementing some components of the project at academic institute. Consultancy provides an ex-cellent opportunity to industry to get an independent advice from the subject matter expert.Cost of the joint/sponsored project or consultancy varies according to the length of the project, expertise, infra-structure required, human resources, and many more. Usually it is substan-tially lower than prevalent industry rates. Additionally, there are a lot of government schemes where govern-ment funding agencies match the industry funding. ChallengesThere are many challenges to tap the potential of academic research. Few are mentioned from industry prospective. The first challenge for the indus-try partner is to come-up with an in-dependent set of problems that can be solved by academic institute. Many a times the problem is a subtask of a big framework and depends on other com-ponents and confidential data that are available only at sponsoring company. For this challenge, there could be vari-ous solutions. With the advent of Inter-net, a person can work from anywhere in the world using the servers, data and infrastructure of the company. This way data and infrastructure of com-pany remain safe and secure. Also, the problem statement could be downsized to the level where academic institute can solve it as a prototype, and industry can take it up for productization.The second challenge is to find suitable partner in academia who has expertise and experience to solve the given problem. There can be no com-prehensive directory that keeps updated profile of experts or faculty members. To solve this problem, industry can use their connections with placement cell of academic institute. This channel can be used to pass their problem state-ments to academic institute. Institute then can assign projects to interested students and faculty members. The third challenge is different level of expectations. Initially starting with smaller projects could be right way to understand the expertise and de-liverability. Over the time, when both parties understand each other, expecta-tions can be agreed upon. If motive is clear, benefits are seen at both sides; logistics issues like owning of intellectual property rights (IPR), publications versus patents, level of involvement, expectations, timeline of the project, and others can be agreed upon by mutual agreement & discussions. Final WordsOverall the collaboration with academ-ia is a great opportunity for Indian in-dustry. It is not only a low cost solution for their research problems, but also provides them additional benefits like publications, patents and trained man power. With industry collaboration, academic institute will also be able to work on more impactful problems and gets some funds to further improve their infrastructure. The collaboration with academia is a great opportunity for Indian industry. It is not only a low cost solution for their research problems, but also provides them additional benefits like publications, patents and trained man powerNeeraj Goel
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