Translating UK-India Partnership to Innovation

Later this year, we will be bringing a UK delegation out to India to visit innovation and incubation centres. The ‘Make in India’ initiative involves the need to promote innovation and entrepreneurs and we believe the UK’s expertise in this area could be leveraged to create more joint collaborations. To better understand our own innovation ecosystem, I met with several key players in the UK last month.

I started by visiting Cambridge University’s IdeaSpace, which provides support for start-ups and is a key part of the University’s entrepreneurship centre. My colleague Sunil Kumar visited IdeaSpace a couple of years ago – so my visit was an opportunity to discuss with its founding Director, Stewart McTavish, on IdeaSpace’s interests in India. This includes working with Indian science parks and innovation/ incubation agencies. I also met with Dr Tony Raven, Chief Executive Officer of Cambridge Enterprise, which is responsible for commercialisation arrangements for University discoveries. Tony mentioned about three services provided by the organisation – technology transfer services, consultancy services and seed funds.

From the quaint lanes of the countryside, I was back to London, bustling with tourists enjoying the English summer. I had a meeting scheduled with Dr. Sankalp Chaturvedi, Director of Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Imperial College London. Launched in 2007, the centre is actively engaged in helping Indian and UK companies improve performance in innovation management. The centre is currently mentoring BML Munjal University (BMU), an initiative of Hero Group, helping it grow and develop its School of Management. The centre is also involved in designing customised Executive MBA programs for many large corporations, in partnership with Indian School of Business (ISB). Moving on, I met with officials from the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) for the various programmes that are being executed under the Newton Bhabha Fund. You may recollect from my previous blog where I had written about the Newton Bhabha Higher Education Partnership programme. The call for Expression of Interest (EOI) is open until 31st August 2015. Interested institutions may reach out to me for further details on the programme! In addition, SIN is actively engaged in the innovation related programmes led by Innovate UK under translation strand of Newton Bhabha Fund. Do watch this space for the announcement of the next call for India-UK Collaborative Industrial R&D Programme.

Next on my agenda was the ‘city of dreaming spires’, Oxford! I met with Dr Rakesh Roshan, Deputy Head of Technology Transfer and India Head at Isis Innovation, University of Oxford. Isis Innovation manages technology transfer and academic consulting for Oxford University providing consultancy services to clients around the world. India is high on the agenda of Isis Innovation and the organisation is working with several universities including Indian Institute of Science Bengaluru, Nehru Gram Bharati University Allahabad and University of Calcutta, to name a few.

By bringing UK innovation and incubation experts to India we continue to forge long term sustainable partnerships that will build on some of the activities that we have done before. For instance, under the umbrella of the Bangalore Cambridge Innovation Network, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms and Judge Business School, Cambridge had organized a one-day workshop in Bangalore on 6th January 2015 for scientists and entrepreneurs to work on clarifying their business proposition and prepare them to incubate companies.