IIT Kharagpur has launched an innovation centre to promote the culture of innovation among its undergraduate students right from their first year.
Named after its alumnus and former faculty, the M N Faruqui Innovations Centre was launched yesterday with seed-funding by another alumnus Arjun Malhotra, the co-founder of HCL technologies, officials said.
The centre would promote the culture of innovation among a wide cross section of students and faculty with support from its alumni and the industry, they said.
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Understanding that today's innovations is not related to any specific domain or discipline, they said this centre was being set up to encourage and encompass multi-disciplinary interactions between students and faculty at all levels of education, undergraduate, postgraduate and research.
The Innovations Centre comprises a Design Facility and Tinkering Laboratory.
While the Design Facility of the Innovations Centre supports a meeting, brainstorming and conferencing centre with Computing and Information Technology aiding its activities for all those involved to generate new product concepts and ideas, the Tinkering Lab provides a venue to make and experiment with various components to realise these into novel products or systems.
The Tinkering Laboratory has collaborative conferencing tools, 3D printers, a mechanical workshop with fabrication machinery, electronics workbenches, PCB fabrication set-ups, and prototyping tools for embedded systems among others.
In addition, there is support to train students in trans-disciplinary areas at early stages of engineering studies and will be linked to the curriculum with project- based learning.
Faculty may also involve students from different streams to help them realize novel ideas being generated in this process, they said.
