Gone are the days when university professors only taught students. Today, academics at top technical institutes are not just engaged in cutting-edge research of their own but are also commercialising know-how in partnership with industry and turning entrepreneurs themselves. Be it a a‚¹300-crore project to devise novel teaching methods through direct-to-home (DTH) services or a a‚¹100-crore centre to research datadriven solutions for road safety or a joint centre of excellence with the tyre industry to improve performance of tyres with mathematical models and algorithms. These are just a few real-world problems the faculty at the Indian Institute of TechnologyMadras (IITM) is working on. The organisation that brings together academics, government agencies and the corporate sector for this turns 50 this year.

IIT-M's office of Industrial Consultancy and Sponsored Research (IC&SR) celebrates its golden jubilee this year. The centre is now targeting projects of more than a‚¹1,000 crore a year with almost a‚¹500 crore coming from corporates. It also plans to provide up to a‚¹25 crore from its internal revenues to promote blue-sky research, where real-world results may not be immediately apparent but there could be breakthroughs in the long term. In 2021-22, IIT-M generated more than a‚¹1,000 crore in funding in a single fiscal year for the first time -a‚¹768 crore from projects sanctioned by the central and state governments and a‚¹313 crore in industry consultancy. Set up in 1973 to facilitate research projects that create impact in industry and help in nation-building, by the 1990's IC&SR had grown to focus on project management, finances etc. , so that academics could focus on what they did best. For instance, the ports and harbours
of the country engage closely with the ocean engineering faculty of IIT-M to solve specific problems such as extending life of certain structures.

"At the core IC&SR remains the same but in the last 50 years more components have been added, such as a legal cell to draft the agreements and an inhouse Intellectual Property (IP) cell for IP management," says Manu Santhanam, dean of IITM IC&SR. The total funding typically shows a growth rate of 5-8% year-on-year but industry funding has seen a greater spurt in recent years, he adds. The major jump in projects has come from IIT-M's strengths around information and communications technology (ICT) including 5G-related research and artificial intelligence-powered language translation projects.

Some large conglomerates have also set up centres of excellence (CoE) for core product development. The Raghupati Singhania CoE for tyre & vehicle mechanics, established by JK Tyres and IIT-M in 2004, is one of the oldest industry-academia research projects in the country The centre, which has produced 16 MS and 8 PhDs, studies tyre performance concepts such as wear and tear, endurance, noise and vibration, and also focuses on designing EV tyres. "Our students and researchers get access to the R&D facility of JK Tyres. Nowhere else can we see research so tightly coupled with product and tech development for an entire industry," says IIT-M professor Krishna Kumar.

A review of the 2022 NIRF rankings shows that IIT-M's IC&SR has been the most successful in terms of quantum of funding attracted. Despite being a government organisation, IC&SR has tried to keep pace with industry demands, says Santhanam, crediting their inhouse project management software Tula for this. However, a lot of work needs to be done to ensure that revenue is generated from technology transfer. Monetisation of patents or knowhow at IIT-M is still lagging when compared to its global peers such as Stanford or Berkeley. Stanford, for instance, made close to $89 million (730+ crore) from technology transfers in 2021-22. This stood at 6 crore at IIT-M. "We are using the 50th year milestone to accelerate technology commercialisation by proactively engaging with industry. The institute has also set a target of 'one patent a day' from faculty research. Academics are still more focused on research papers
than filing patents, and we at IC&SR hope to change that," says dean Santhanam.