IIMA, IIT-Mumbai lend innovators a helping hand

In a bid to promote grassroot innovators with excellent ideas in the country, two premier institutes "" Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIMA) and Indian Institute of Technology-Mumbai (IIT-M) may now start working together to promote these innovations in India and abroad.

Meanwhile, IIMA has also decided to work as a facilitator and pressure group on policy formation for such innovators. It would also act to bridge the gap between the innovators and entrepreneurs through its very own entity, Centre for Incubation, Innovation and Entrepreneurs (CIIE).

"CIIE, working since 2001, has already handled a whopping 36,000 innovations from across the country. Now we are planning to promote these grassroot innovations with technical expertise from IITs and talks for this purpose are in an advanced stage with IIT-M.

IIMA is coming up with a separate building within its new campus which will house the 'Incubation Centre' where such grassroot innovators will be trained, their ideas will be polished so that they are able to take their products to the market in a much better way.

"The Gujarat government has already sanctioned a fund of Rs 1.28 crore for the new facility which will be opened by next September," Bakul Dholakia, director of IIMA, told Business Standard on Friday.

IIMA is now preparing a very detail directory of all these innovations and shortly a website www.indiainnovates.com would be launched which would feature major innovations during the last three years.

Pointing out that the government lacks a proper policy framework to handle these innovations which are sometimes much better in quality than the imported ones, Anil Gupta, senior faculty member of IIMA and head of National Innovation Foundation, said that IIMA is also in the process of forming a policy in this regard.

"We are working on the direction of building a network between the formal and informal innovation sectors while we are also trying to come out with a draft policy in this respect. There are also various issues which we are taking with the government and we will be sending our recommendations to the ministry of finance and ministry of industries for encouraging small innovators," said Gupta.

While IIMA will train the innovators in product marketing, providing protection under Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and filing for patents in India and abroad, IIT-Mumbai will extend its hand to help innovators with their technical inputs.

IIMA has already prepared a list of recommendations which would be finalised following a meeting of a number of innovators and entrepreneurs including corporate members during the meet 'Indian Incubator for Innovation Based Enterprises,' which was inaugurated here on Friday. The workshop is sponsored by Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and CIIE.

According to Gupta, the major issue is lack of any corpus dedicated to research & development (R&D).

"The consortium of associations catering to specific needs of each industry should contribute to a corpus fund and this fund will be used for R&D and product development. There is also a need for revamping the Indian Patents Act as this system is now outdated being over 120 years old and in keeping with the technology changes," he added.

Interestingly, in the last four years while CIIE and IIMA have handled 36,000 innovations, 60 patent applications have been filed in India but all such applications are still pending. On the other hand, among six patent applications filed with the US, one already has been approved and rest are expected to be approved shortly.