Roorkee (The Hawk): Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IIT Roorkee) Department of Design organized a two day Industry Academia Meet from April 22-23, 2023. The objective of Academia Meet - Insight on Innovation: Success Stories - was to provide a platform that connected corporates and experts from different fields and facilitated sharing of experiences related to the field of innovation. The visitors were also given a glimpse of ongoing frontier research activities at various Centres of Excellence in the campus. The workshop sought to reduce the gap between academia and industry, and to deliberate upon how students could help innovation in industry to build products in the most optimized way.
Chief Guest of the inauguration session was Prof. Apurbba Kumar Sharma, Dean of academic Affairs and the Guest of Honor, Mr. Rajat Bhalotia (Managing Director, Wonder products) shared their inspiring entrepreneurial journey with the students. Among other dignitaries were Prof. Inderdeep Singh, Head of Department of Design. Additionally, Prof. Rajat Agrawal, Associate Dean of Innovation and Incubation guided the audience with the importance of innovation management and how the introduction of ISO 56000 would create a system of innovation management.
The students received guidance from esteemed speakers who were pioneers in their respective fields, while they shared their success stories of innovation. Amongst the speakers were Mr. Sunil Ranganathan, who is an experienced AI/ML Product leader from Tredence, shared how AI/ML are being used in regular business activities, focusing on Design excellence through Ideation and Innovation. Mr. Harshit Sinha, Senior Production Manager, and Mr. Bablu Dey, Lead Technologist from ITC shared how ITC is building and inculcating an Innovative ecosystem at product and process innovation. Mr. Nikhil Maheshwari, Vice President, R&D Division, Hindware Home Innovation Limited provided key insights into the importance of process innovation and the creation of Smart and commercially viable innovation by empathizing with the user and identifying the gaps to innovate.
Dr Shashikant shared his experiences with Flipkart and Maruti Udyog in relation to multiple innovations. Ms Darshan Gandhi, from Godrej, shared innovations done at Godrej and how those helped in capturing international markets. Prof Vinay Sharma, Prof Gaurav Raheja from IIT Roorkee also shared their experiences with the students.
The event concluded with Panel Discussion, hosted by Prof. Manish Kumar Asthana, Joint Faculty at Department of Design where students got an opportunity to interact with the speakers and enlightened with the importance of ethics in innovation and guided with the industry norms and policies one should follow at every stage of innovation.
On cultivating the entrepreneurial culture, Prof K K Pant, Director, IIT Roorkee said, "The entrepreneurial and innovation culture supports start-ups forms the rock-solid foundation for a progressive economy. This culture brings in enhanced scope among Universities, Enterprises, and Governments at large to foster innovative ideas and help them get converted into gains for the economy."
Chief Guest, Prof. Apurbba Kumar Sharma, Dean of academic Affairs, highlighted, "Innovation will be essential to bring about qualitative changes in education, as opposed to the quantitative expansion seen so far. These changes are needed to increase efficiency and improve the quality and equity of learning opportunities." While sharing his journey as an entrepreneur, Guest of Honor, Mr. Rajat Bhalotia (Managing Director, Wonder products), said, "Creating next-generation innovative methods is the need of the hour. This is where we should increasingly leverage the research advances being made by Universities spanning areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, medical technologies, renewable energy and material science."
