Whoa! This is so good. This must be extended to Life Sciences...we have good science sitting on the shelves of our institutes. Just not enough risk money to innovate. Thank you for this. If you ever want to cover the Life Science ecosystem in India...please reach out to me. . ramona@ignitelsf.in.
Agree, entirely. After DeepMind published the likely shapes of millions of proteins, I have been advocating Indian companies, universities to get to work to identify useful proteins.
The real issue is attitude. Our universities will take decades to change gear from teaching to research. Besides funding, building up the requisite faculty will also be a problem, in the unlikely event of some of them really trying. But we do have some large business establishments which can focus on research. They won't, basically because they are looking for quick returns. The lack of affordable credit on long term basis may be one factor behind this attitude. Many researches in the West might have spent millions of dollars before they got abandoned as failures. Such cost is loaded to the subsequent successfully researched products. In India, one failure will be enough to force the research organisation to wind up. And if it is in the public sector, the situation will be much worse!
Well said, you have nailed it. Companies will not look at research and innovation because they want quick runs. I work with Ignite Life Science Foundation and we work across all institutes with funding from csr and philanthropy from enlightened companies, funding basic life science research. A small start and some success stories. But a long way to go. www.ignitelsf.in
One of the main drawbacks of the R&D culture in traditional engineering companies is the complete lack of focus on industrial design; R&D seems to revel in providing better and better functionality without considering aesthetics and usability. Sure, it's fine to think of usability in scientific terms and make it a a function - i.e ergonomics, human factors etc. But usability is more than ergonomics. To top it all, aesthetics is sacrificed at the altar of the design mantra 'form follows function'.
For decades my rooting for splitting the R&D (Research and Development*) function into two - Research & Design <+> Product Development & Prototyping, has been falling on deaf ears. (Prototyping is an essential part of product design)
*R&D as a single function might have made sense until the late 20th century. While research can be largely disconnected with business as usual (not going into all the justifications here), product development and prototyping works better as an embedded activity.
Whoa! This is so good. This must be extended to Life Sciences...we have good science sitting on the shelves of our institutes. Just not enough risk money to innovate. Thank you for this. If you ever want to cover the Life Science ecosystem in India...please reach out to me. . ramona@ignitelsf.in.
Agree, entirely. After DeepMind published the likely shapes of millions of proteins, I have been advocating Indian companies, universities to get to work to identify useful proteins.
The real issue is attitude. Our universities will take decades to change gear from teaching to research. Besides funding, building up the requisite faculty will also be a problem, in the unlikely event of some of them really trying. But we do have some large business establishments which can focus on research. They won't, basically because they are looking for quick returns. The lack of affordable credit on long term basis may be one factor behind this attitude. Many researches in the West might have spent millions of dollars before they got abandoned as failures. Such cost is loaded to the subsequent successfully researched products. In India, one failure will be enough to force the research organisation to wind up. And if it is in the public sector, the situation will be much worse!
Well said, you have nailed it. Companies will not look at research and innovation because they want quick runs. I work with Ignite Life Science Foundation and we work across all institutes with funding from csr and philanthropy from enlightened companies, funding basic life science research. A small start and some success stories. But a long way to go. www.ignitelsf.in
One of the main drawbacks of the R&D culture in traditional engineering companies is the complete lack of focus on industrial design; R&D seems to revel in providing better and better functionality without considering aesthetics and usability. Sure, it's fine to think of usability in scientific terms and make it a a function - i.e ergonomics, human factors etc. But usability is more than ergonomics. To top it all, aesthetics is sacrificed at the altar of the design mantra 'form follows function'.
For decades my rooting for splitting the R&D (Research and Development*) function into two - Research & Design <+> Product Development & Prototyping, has been falling on deaf ears. (Prototyping is an essential part of product design)
*R&D as a single function might have made sense until the late 20th century. While research can be largely disconnected with business as usual (not going into all the justifications here), product development and prototyping works better as an embedded activity.
Agree, form and function must go together, to succeed in the marketplacer