Speaking at Delhi University about UN SDGs & an Industry-Academia Interface

I was recently invited to the 10th International Conference on Business and Management 2022-23 [icbm.sbsc.in] at the Shaheed Bhagat Singh College Campus at University of Delhi. The conference was themed under the umbrella of the United Nations SDGs 2030[Read More]. It was an honor to be invited as a guest and share my perspective with the audience at the conference.

Harsh Rathi at10th International Conference on Business and Management at the University of Delhi.


The following is a scattering of thoughts from my panel discussion and Q&A within the context of an Industry-Academia Interface. Being integrated within the industry this section of the conference particularly interested me for I believe Industry drives the established capital state of the world and that Industry maintains the substantial reach that would help us achieve the SDGs.

I focus here on economic models of sustainability as it has been well observed that as populations become more economically sustainable, they can then afford to be more environmentally conscious. 
At the very least it becomes easier to communicate environmental consequences to such a population because the feedback loop of environmental consequences is much larger -practically invisible- than that of day-to-day economic challenges.
Without economic security, especially in a country as diverse and heterogeneous as India it will be very difficult and even in areas unreasonable to expect a change in the social fabric of society when it comes to prioritizing the environment. 

Any interface between Industry and academia if ubiquitous would at best create a win-win scenario only by happenstance. The life and validity of such an arrangement would not be reliable but rather would be unpredictable.
A formal platform for exchange and extrapolation of areas of intersection should ideally be a deliberate exercise and not just the happenstance of academic research and innovations trickling down into the industry.

The market is always demanding innovations in countless areas. It's an endless pie. Not zero-sum. So although the scope is boundaryless, but like I said before that also makes it ubiquitous. We need different academic institutions to align themselves with organizations with shared vision and have in a way many one-to-one long-term relationships of collaboration within defined boundaries.


There are primarily two ways innovations reach the masses.


1. When stars align. Do they? Oh wow, apparently they do.

This is when academic research and innovation with no practical purpose some day late in the future gets adopted by the industry to solve market issues. So it goes from academia to industry to market.
I recalled an anecdote from Benjamin Franklin when he discovered electricity. When asked about the utility of it he responded with the question asking the utility of a newborn baby. It was all about future potential. Now I do not know the validity of truth to this but it does its job of illustrating the point. The potential of electricity as we know it now when brought to the masses changed the course of our civilization. Existing industries were revolutionized and even more spawned off of that one discovery.
The microwave, penicillin, plastic, and the pacemaker are some other such inventions and discoveries made accidentally without prior intent. Innovations such as these come out of scientists and researchers working in more-or-less boundary-less sandboxes and change the world forever.
I do not however see this being the nature of industry-academia partnerships.


2. Necessity being the mother of innovation.

The market demands from the industry, and then Industry works with academia on solutions. So it goes from market demand to industry to academia.
This way of industry-academia partnership I see being long-term sustainable. While Industry does have CSR and other necessary structures I am limiting myself to a win-win business case for both academia and industry.
Being in business involves teams, often very big teams, and by extension of that- thousands of families' lives and livelihoods depend and rely on the company in business being successful and performing well in the open market. So, that among various other reasons makes me see the win-win model being one from market to industry to academia.
This model insures academia allocates its bandwidth to market-validated problems. Market-led innovation is a necessity for Industry for any kind of partnership.


All of this however is not to say that we should not let the scientists do their science and researchers their research without direct specific demand from industry. I have presented one prong of a multi-pronged attack toward achieving SGDs. There is an undeniable history of discoveries and innovations that trickled down to consumers many years after they were discovered with no foresight of consumer application at the time of their discovery. But I for now leave such frameworks to dedicated research labs, sponsorships, fundraising, grants, and such.


Low Hanging Actionables


- University departments could have dedicated pages, their department manifestos, on their websites that state their areas of interest and invite organizations with shared goals to reach out and collaborate/partner continually.
On the flip side, companies could have dedicated pages for academic institutions to discover them and know their areas of interest and goals.
An ongoing legacy of work in an area(s) for a university department will help incoming new batches of students know their possibilities within Industry. A proven pedigree of work in an area would make organizations more trusting, willing, and even proactive toward collaboration. This will also keep on building an alumni network that is tightly knit and specialized.

- Even in periods of no collaboration with their regular collaborating partners, academic departments should keep on churning research and reports for the industry to refer to. If their partner organizations are working with local markets, then it has much use for those applicable research insights over a bunch of papers published in a reputed foreign journal for vanity.

- The natural transition for most students is from academia to industry. So the touchpoint of a student with industry should happen by the end of their first year rather than at the end of their academic journey. Student projects should be done in tandem with their departments' industry partners. This shall make them prepared to step into the industry at the end of their formal academic journey.

- Every graduating student from any program should come out with at least some marketable skillset. A B.com student who knows Accounting very well but does not know how to work with accounting software will be preferred over one with maybe lower grades but has a marketable skillset.

//Perhaps I would like to expand the articulation of this scattering to fit other Asia Pacific countries sometime in the future. Preliminary thoughts say the nature of an Industry-Academia interface could be standardized further because of relatively more homogenous in-border markets.

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