Implementation-based innovation should be led by academia

There was a panel discussion on the role to be played by the academia in the 5G regime.

Vipin Tyagi, Executive Director, C-DoT, said there are such large academic institutions in India. On the other hand, there is expectation that they will be working on cutting-edge technology. How are people solving problems through their research? We need to do this. As for R&D, 5G is fundamental. We also need to think big.

Kishore Babu, DDG, DoT spoke about the innovations in 5G. The 2025 market projections by 4IR Technologies are 5G, AI, quantum computing. There are opportunities for collaborations among the stakeholders -- academia, industry and government. There can be collaborations among the islands of excellence, linkages between humanities and technology, new era of mission-oriented STI policy, and KPIs similar to the knowledge exchange framework.

The academia can do more by building collaboration. There is lot of capacity available in the industry. The academia should identify areas, and have the students and the industry working on those. Start-ups today are doing much more work.

Academia and LMLC

Pamela Kumar, DG, TSDSI, said that the role of the academia is in building competency and capability. They also play a role in setting direction. We need engineering and technology to solve problems. We proposed LMLC at ITU. We also released it at 3GPP. It was all done from the academia, and less than 5 people. Rural broadband needs to connect differently and focused on an India-specific problem.

India has 3,500+ engineering colleges, with 14 lakh students graduating each year. The core strategy and product development has not been the focus so far. All about innovation is all about getting competitive.

Preetham Uthaiah, EVP, Marketing & Strategy, Saankhya Labs, added that we look at the academia as a supporting role for the industry for technology development. We see there are multiple roles academia can play in building use cases. 5G gives you an opportunity to follow a 3GPP waveform. Everyone is looking at 5G as an enterprise app. Can we leverage it as a beneficial technology for India? Can we use satellite, along with 5G? Academia can play a role here. Implementation-based innovation should be led by academia.

We are today talking about the role of academia in 5G! It should have been done several years ago. The role of academia should be in looking at implementation roles. We have enough problems to solve, so, we should work on 6G or even 7G.

Brejesh Lal, NCC Coordinator, IIT Delhi, cleared the air, saying that the academia plays two roles -- HR generation and training. We are also doing specialized training for students.

The IITs were made for producing world-class students. As for the academia's role, making research a primary, is an interesting point. A lot of faculty is publishing such reports. Faculty today does research. On cutting-edge research, it is looking to handhold the industry, and develop new products. Hand-holding does not make us innovators and leaders. We need to find ways of rewarding them.

Unless a professor is learning every day, he cannot teach new things every day. We have to look at the inorganic and the organic. We also have to put faith in people so that they move from solving problems to providing solutions for tomorrow. Publishing low-hanging fruits is the easiest thing to do! Then, why do we need to work harder? This thought needs to change!

We have some of the most intelligent people. We are caught up in solving recent problems. We have to use our capability and rise up to show the world what we can do.