Translating ideas into solutions: India on the cusp of transformation in science, technology and innovation

The current Economic Survey lays emphasis on the central role of science, technology and innovation (STI) in achieving India’s goal of fast, sustainable economic growth. It calls for boosting innovation by doubling of spending on research and development, greater involvement of younger scientists in decision-making bodies, increase in the number of investigator-led projects, leveraging the scientific diaspora, and greater public engagement of science establishments. Some specific initiatives by the government to nurture the STI ecosystem can further ensure efficient delivery of science and technology led solutions. In spite of spending only 0.8% of its GDP on R&D, India has attained impressive growth both in the number of scientific publications and patents filed. It ranks fifth in the number of such publications, falling behind only the US, China, UK and Germany, and 12th in number of patents filed. The immediate challenge for the Indian STI system is to rapidly transform knowledge and technologies into commercially attractive solutions and build entrepreneurial communities around them. Although there is a great enthusiasm among the scientists to push their ideas and seek grant support, a majority of their proposals do not pass initial scrutiny. For example, in nanotechnology nearly 90% of grant proposals do not clear the initial peer-review evaluation, either due to lack of novelty or poor translational potential. In other areas of cutting-edge technologies, the position is not that different. This constricts bottom up growth. Additionally, knowledge arising out of the supported grants does not pass the translational value filters and most of the patents rarely get used. Much greater efforts for nurturing upstream research and turning it into use inspired outcomes will help utilise the government push for providing downstream support like setting up technology transfer offices, technology parks, incubators, and giving incentives for startups. What are the critical levers for improving output of the Indian STI system? As science gets increasingly multidisciplinary, potential ideas emerge at the intersection of seemingly unrelated disciplines. A collegium needs to be set up in the institutions for an inter-disciplinary screening of grants. The collegium needs to be supported by analytical tools and external experts in patent-informatics, product profiling, and market intelligence.

Research grant proposals should pass through such a filter at the institutional level before intramural and extramural support is sought. The inclusion of user organisations, patent attorneys, market experts and potential investors in the peer-review team of the government funding agencies will strengthen the value of applied and translational research. These entities should also mentor investigators of rejected ideas so as to encourage them to apply again and again to broaden the base and for the faster turnover of the ideas. At the execution level, scientists can speed up translational projects by outsourcing device fabrication or prototyping and seeking the services of clinical research organisations in order to avoid mundane experiments which otherwise consume a lot of time. Given the resource constraints faced by institutions to procure and maintain mega facilities, advanced instruments for analytics, imaging, genomics, data analytics and animal house and biobank facilities for clinical research should be made available by government-supported startup companies located in a cluster of institutions and managed by trained scientists. A technology and innovation based economy largely depends on working on ideas emanating from the results of fundamental and use-inspired discoveries. Scientists should therefore wean themselves away from dependence on publications to pick up scientific questions and instead think of research problems that have local relevance. Setting up startups in rural areas with an active link to research institutions will allow user-driven product customisation and diffusion of startup culture in the village economy, thereby making innovation policy genuinely inclusive. Necessary flexibility should be introduced in the administrative and legal framework in universities and research/ technology institutions in order to promote the creation of startup companies by principal investigators. Scientists working in universities and research institutions should be allowed to take unpaid leave while trying their ideas in the startup companies. And ‘innovation effort’ should be one of the performance indicators for academic promotions. Such policy advances can shift the position of large section of scientists from being researchers to being innovators and can thereby significantly enhance the productivity of the Indian STI system.

Source: https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/


Leave Your Comment

Your email will not be published or shared. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>