Coordinating community innovations: Study of Techpedia

We intend to study the process of innovations or knowledge being drawn from the community through the process of dissemination of information backed by structured collaboration. The project specifically focuses on understanding the process of community innovations by taking Techpedia as a case under study.

With nearly 2000 engineering colleges and other thousands of polytechnic institutions, India has a strong framework for imparting technical education. Each year, these institutes enrol lakhs of students as a part of their curriculum. However, the level of research and innovation from these colleges is abysmally low.

Every student has a mandatory project in his/her final year, which is a six month long investment by the student attempting to give a solution to prevailing concerns in the industry or future technology frontiers. However, these projects hold very less merit in terms of their authenticity and seriousness, the objectives being rarely achieved. The reasons cited for this include lack of time, improperly defined problem statements, inability to conceptualize entire system in the given time, involvement and seriousness of stakeholders like professors, students, industry etc.

This project aims to address the following concerns.

•  How can we make the projects more specific?
• How can the projects be innovative rather than being mere repetitions?
•  How can the projects build upon other contributions to take the system forward?
• How can collaboration between the stakeholders of the project be enhanced?

These challenges can be met by providing a platform or forum for interaction among various stakeholders. We need to promote collaborative research where an entire system can be developed in 6 months, not by one team but by several teams across institutions. Also, collaboration can then be extended to other fields of education.

Techpedia, being a database of a number of technical projects from premier institutions of the country has a potential to act as a source of information for the industry and the academia, which may be constructively used for collaboration in order to generate viable interdependent solutions to industry problems. We aim to understand the concerns in collaborative research and try to suggest the gaps which Techpedia can fill or improve its services.

 
We intend follow the following processes to realize our objective:

• Surveys among engineering students from private colleges, government colleges and IITs 
• Interaction with teachers on challenges of doing collaborative projects 
• Adminsitrative hassles in project coordination across various stakeholders.

We hope to present a model for pilot testing towards the end of this exercise.


Shantam, Ankita