How can India strengthen university research and accelerate innovation
Enabling an “Innovation Economy” is increasingly seen as the core policy and execution challenge that will lift the growth rates for emerging countries.
Having a strong research infrastructure that produces world-class outcomes in both fundamental and applied research is a key pillar of enabling the innovation economy.
A strong educational institute that excels in research in a given field has often been the epicentre for a strong startup ecosystem that innovates based on the research happening in the institution.
An MIT report published in 2015 outlines the economic impact created by alumni.
MIT Alumni have created about 30,000 companies, employing about 4.6 million people, generating nearly $2 trillion in annual revenues. Now that's quite a non-linear contribution to GDP growth driven by innovation.
Stanford University has created startups like Sun Microsystems, VMWare, Google commercialized research-based ideas and went on to become global corporate superpowers with stratospheric market capitalizations.
Replicating those innovation ecosystems is key to getting the nonlinear acceleration that can propel India from 7–7.5% to 10% growth rates.
Original, high-quality university research is key to the innovation-entrepreneurial ecosystem. A lot of the startups founded at MIT or Stanford were based on commercialization of academic research. Taking a cue from that China and other countries are focussing on ensuring that original academic research is promoted in a systemic way by the government policies.
As an example, this economic research mentions how in the period between 2000 to 2016, China systematically increased its scientific publications in the international journals and now accounts for about 23% of journal articles. This puts China as one of the largest contributors to global science.
The number of PhDs graduating and original research papers published in reputable international journals are some of the leading indicators of measuring research output across institutions.
Sadly in India, as most of the institutes are churning out graduates this quality metric has been ignored. The overall research mindset and quality of research are not anywhere near international standards.
Addressing the 106th Indian Science Congress, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said..
“Over 95 per cent Indian students study in State Universities and colleges, where research is still limited. A strong research ecosystem needs to be developed in these universities.”
We will look at some reasons for the research gap and practical ways to address it in the short term.
5 reasons that prevent quality research output from India Educational Institutes and Practical ways to improve that
A] Getting a PhD is considered as a “necessary evil” for getting career advancement and not as a research motivator.
Most universities and deemed universities require a PhD to get promoted in terms of paygrades and career ladder. Research PhD is different from getting a PhD to advance a career in the teaching track. Since most of the candidates are not serious about the research itself this has created a “shell PhDs” industry. PhDs are manufactured by choosing an obscure topic with no industry applicability or interest. When the motivation is to only get the degree and not the knowledge, “Jugaad” based quick-fix approach to game the system into getting the degree is more of the norm rather than an exception.
Solution
- Separate Research Track from Teaching Track. Remove requirements for acquiring a PhD for teaching track for UG courses. Removing this requirement for career progression will eliminate non-serious candidates from pursuing PhDs.
- Focus selection and grant of PhDs to only those who produce serious academic research and add quality requirements like publication in reputable journals or industry sponsorship before the degree is conferred.
B] The quantity of PhDs is not adequate for a large economy like India. We need to rapidly create additional PhD and Research Capacity
In addition to the quality issues described above, the quantity of PhD programs is not adequate to support a large economy like India. The double whammy of lack of quantity and lack of quality means that the overall PhD output is dismal.
In the short term, the quantity of additional PhD and research output needs to be increased drastically.
Solution
- Open “Research Only” institutions that focus on PhD and “research only” degrees. Having separate “research only” focus will create specialized institutions, attract serious candidates and remove the administrative burden to maintain a viable teaching program.
- Increase the PhD and postgraduate intake in institutions of repute. Currently, the postgrad/PhD intake in many of the institutes is less than 20% of their undergrad courses. The government has taken a good first step in establishing a framework to create world-class “Institutions of Eminence”. However, most of the government funding in leading institutions like IIT/IISc goes towards funding the teaching track and administrative overhead of undergraduate courses. A significant increase in the research allocation for these institutions can jumpstart the path towards them transforming to institutions known for their world-class research output.
C] Encourage students to take research as a part of the undergrad courses.
Most of our undergrad engineering colleges have become factories to churn out graduates who have the degree but are barely employable. The number of students getting placed and the median salary is the ultimate success criteria for a college to tout about its quality. In this placement number game both the need for research and the execution is lost.
Ministry of HRD has added research focused measurement criteria such as papers published, quality of papers published and Intellectual property in their weighted evaluation of courses based on a National Institutional Ranking Framework. However, the measured outcomes (except for a few notable exceptions which are not adequate for a large economy like India) on the research criteria are dismal even for some of the best engineering institutions in the country. Quality of research simply does not matter for most institutions and there is no pressing need to improve it.
How do we then ensure atleast the top 100 colleges can rapidly improve research publications and IP generated via research? Further, how can we ensure that any improvements are institutionalized and we don’t just quote the success of 1% of a top IISc/IIT in doing something exceptional as a measure of institutionalized success?
Solution
- Undergrad Research: Start integrated undergrad degrees with 1 year set aside for research
A practical way to do this is to start hybrid “sandwich” courses with 1 year set aside to develop a research idea. All while studying for your undergrad. Alternative ideas like an integrated 5-year post graduate course with 2 years devoted to research can be explored. Autonomy can be given to deemed/reputed institutions to provide those. To incentivize students to take the 5-year course a post-graduation degree can be conferred at the end of it based on successful research outcomes.
High-quality students in the undergrad programs (who are today going abroad for their Masters/PhD) would now have spent a dedicated year or two doing research. Adequate IP protection for the research and access to startup accelerator/incubator based on the research can also help realize the entrepreneurial potential of research and indirectly ensure that students take up the research ideas that have commercial potential.
2. Ensure industry participation and incentives in the research
The government can provide policy incentives in terms of tax benefits or startup tax holidays on commercialized research. This will ensure that the undergrad students are sponsored adequately by industry. Liberal sharing of IP rights between the university and sponsoring industry will also create an incentive for the industry to sponsor research and provide quality guidance to students.
Original research published by students while in their UG courses will also be something that the students will aspire for in terms of brownie points for applying for PG/PhD courses to universities abroad.
The government can add policy incentives like concessions in student fees, monetary incentives for publications and opportunities to travel to international conferences to qualified individuals.
D] IP Creation and Royalty sharing is weak and does not incentivize innovators. Fix that.
In India, Professors are expected to be doing a noble profession at below-market compensation. This is not conducive to attracting talent. As a result, monetizing research and intellectual property is unheard of in many colleges.
Create liberal IP sharing and patent regimes where the IP is co-owned by researcher and academic institution and any royalty from the research is shared with the researcher can create incentives. Professors should legally and honourably be able to supplement their income via IP royalties.
Other policy ideas like creating a fund sponsored by the government to encourage applying for global patents. Policy frameworks for sharing IP/sweat equity in any startups based on the research and other ways to help the researchers get monetary benefits for their work will ensure that research minded individuals find it attractive.
E] Understand that for most private colleges Education is a “for profit” business. Provide incentives to profit from research
Driven by the hiring boom ushered by the IT/ITES services industry many engineering colleges have mushroomed to churn out “placement ready” engineers. Driven by regulations and forced to be affiliated to large universities the course content and outcomes are of least concern to most of the colleges. What matters is filling up the seats and churning out “placement ready” graduates. Who cares for Research?
On the positive side, most of these educational institutes have reasonably high-quality physical infrastructure and are run by entrepreneurial people. Given the right incentives, these institutions are capable of transforming themselves to rapidly improve in both teaching and research quality.
How can we transform some of the better run private educational institutions to develop decent quality (if not world class) research programs? This is of paramount importance since just creating a handful of eminent institutions at the top of the pyramid while ignoring the decay in the rest of the system is not going to transform the overall mindset.
Solutions
Since most of the institutions are run “for profit” it's important to understand the psyche of the institution founders and address them in the proposed solutions.
- Create incentives that allow charging higher fees based on original research published in reputable journals, intellectual property generated etc.. Regulations create perverse incentives for under the table transactions. Deregulating fees that can be charged will encourage many reputable private colleges to hire research faculty, create PG and PhD programs, monetize the IP.
2. Encourage the creation and monetization of entrepreneurial cells attached to private colleges.
Colleges promoting research can setup entrepreneurial cells to encourage commercialization of that research. The colleges can get an equity stake in the startups coming out from these cells. As some of them become successful the colleges can potentially generate exponential IP driven returns based on monetization of the research/startup ecosystem. Other ideas like helping monetize industry collaboration around research can also be explored.
Overall addressing some of these gaps and taking initiatives to rapidly increase the research output is urgently needed. We need to bring about a change in the overall “Research DNA” of our academic institutions and not just focus on creating a few reputable institutes. Practical and pragmatic solutions that understand the root cause of the current situation and experiment with improving it via creative means is the need of the hour. A strong research mindset and improved quality of research from academia will definitely help accelerate innovation-driven growth in the economy.
