 So, good morning. You will notice that today, we are going to discuss research issues in product development. So, here we go. You have been discussing variety of issues related to research. Today, I am going to share with you my thoughts on what kind of research goes into product development because mostly people believe that product is about design, product is about manufacturing, product is about selling. While all that is true, the roots behind any product lie in research and the future development and evolution of a product again depends upon continuous research. So, it is in this context that I wish to discuss with you the research issues in product development. I will briefly discuss the general nature of technology development and its adoption by society because it is important to keep this in the back of our minds. I will also describe two things which are often not discussed as part of our engineering curricula. One is the product ecosystem. Ecosystem is short for economic system which propels the product development and its usage. The second is the product development cycle. We all talk about doing research and developing prototypes and so on, but the product development cycle is much longer and involves several things. It is against this backdrop that I will then discuss the research issues. You will notice a funny heading in my overview says before, during and after and that is the point I wish to make. We are all familiar with research leading to something, but we often do not think about research that is required to be done during the evolution of the product and after a product has been adopted by the society. So, research for product is essentially a continuous process. It starts sometime in the past, it will continue in the future and it exists and happens as we use the product. I will illustrate these points through some examples and as is usual in all my lectures and classes we will end up with an assignment which we will be doing in the afternoon today. We all know that necessity is the mother of invention. So, whenever the society feels the need for something it leads to an invention. However, inventors are necessary. So, the necessity cannot be fulfilled unless there are inventors and it is the job of us teachers to nurture, create, hand hold future inventors. The early discoveries and inventions I have listed some, all of you are familiar with these. Fire for example, existed in nature, but control of fire, lighting it when you wanted and extinguishing it when you do not want it. These extinguishing, extinction was perhaps very simple, but lighting of fire was not very easy. You may, those of you who have read the Indian history would remember an enormous amount of description given about types of fire and how to keep fire alive. It was well known for example, for thousands of early years of the Indian society at least that a fire in a married house would never be extinguished. You have to keep it live because you do not know how you can light it next. It was so difficult then. Wheel and axle again is something that you are familiar with. This invention truly changed the lifestyle of people making movement faster, making carrying of goods easier, liver and pulley added to that. Incline plane and screw, we do not recognize the importance of these things, but you will notice everything is held together in any gadget primarily because these small things exist. These are ubiquitous things. We shall talk about ubiquitous aspects of technology in products later, but all of these led to industrial revolution. I have isolated printing press as an important component because in my opinion printing press was the original information technology device that got invented and because of which the information started becoming widespread and larger and larger number of inventors could have access to whole lot of knowledge that was generated by human societies before. Electronic and IT revolution everybody is familiar with. In the example that I will take today would be an IT product and electronic product. So, let me briefly talk about adoption of any technology or product by a society. Generally, there is a long cycle that is followed. It is not that a product is developed and even manufactured and released in the society. It is not that the society adopts it very quickly. It takes a long time and the penetration or the usage of a product in the larger and larger segment of the society may take really long, long, long time. I have given typical two to ten years as a representative figure. It is not uncommon for certain products not to make a great head way for as long as thirty years, forty years. It is also not uncommon for a few products which have killer apps for example, to percolate in the society in less than six months. We have seen the examples of this. We talk about telecom revolution. In India the telecom revolution was not caused as much by the land line spread as it was caused by the spread of mobiles because mobile has one killer application. Namely, people can talk to each other using the mobile and people love to talk and therefore, people find this to be an extremely useful gadget. Any product, it must serve a felt need. It must be easy to use and should preferably last long. If there are any problems, the product should be maintainable. Last but not the least, the product must be affordable. The word affordable has different connotations to different people. What is affordable to a rich person or a relatively rich society is not necessarily affordable to a poor person or a relatively poor society. And you will notice that the spread and usage of products in any society depends to a very large extent on whether that society can afford that product. It does not matter how much people need it. It does not matter how easy it is to use. But if it is not affordable, people will not adopt it. As I said, I would like to briefly describe the ecosystem or economic system behind any product. All of these are actually well known to us. We can identify each of these segments very easily. But what we do not understand is that while each segment plays its own role, together is what makes a product click in this society. If you remove any one stakeholder, the product ecosystem will simply flop. We begin with the inventors and innovators. These are the people who what we may call traditional researchers, thinkers. Ideally, they should come from within us. The academic institutions are supposed to be the pioneers of early research. We doing research in various problems involving students and students using their creative talents innovating something on their own is always considered a primary source of invention and innovation. But when we talk about a product, we need money to do further development and of course, the product selling, marketing support etcetera. For all of this we require investors. So, money must come in. Money is what can be converted into facilities into additional manpower, into additional paraphernalia like equipment and other things which are required to further develop any prototype into a full flesh product. Please understand that without an appropriate investment at each of the stages of the product evolution, the product may simply die. The innovators and inventors need early investment. So, these are called angel investors in the modern terminology of startup companies. But you require investment in manufacturing plants, investment in building up the business cycle and so on. After this come the product developer or product development. So, this product development if we require research during invention and innovation. So, what we call R and D? We require D and D or design and development during the product development phase. This contributed to by the product developer which could be an individual or a group of people. Once you have done that, you require product manufacturer. Now these manufacturers could be, but need not be associated with the product development. There are independent manufacturing facilities which could be set up. The technology for a product, the product design could be taken up from anywhere and you could just start manufacturing. Finally, the manufacture goods have to be sold and therefore, you require an entire market setup and this market setup would involve distributors, would involve retailers and they would have to be created and nurtured across various cities, towns and even villages depending upon what kind of product you are selling. Once the product starts selling and people start using it, remember no product leaves perpetually. In fact, different products will have, will develop different problems. So, we must understand one thing about two things about the product. A, every product has a life. So, no product exists perpetually and I would include even houses for example, in a product. A typical life of a modern house, modern building could be 50 to 60 years. After that, it starts creaking and you have problem. But during the life time, there are always issues about the operations of the gadget or the product and therefore, you require maintenance technicians. These maintenance technicians form a group of within the ecosystem of their own. Typically, the manufacturer does not provide the maintenance technicians, but it is the seller or the distributor who appoints maintenance technicians who will then support the product repairs or any such support function that you require where the customers could go to that particular shop or call a maintenance technician home and so on. You will find that the user or the purchaser is the last link in the ecosystem. Please note that the entire ecosystem will survive only if purchaser decides to spend money to purchase the product, otherwise there is no ecosystem. However, once a set of purchasers have decided to spend money, that is the revenue which comes in and that sustains the entire chain continuing with newer and newer innovations. Now, this is the most important point. We use products, we develop products, we develop product prototypes, we actually do what we may call complementary development around products etcetera. That is all part of our engineering R and D or science R and D. However, products are not mainly about knowledge and technology. Products are primarily about wealth generation. Now, this must be understood. The end objective of any product is wealth generation for all the components of the ecosystem that I mentioned. And of course, when the wealth is generated by the components and all these components are part of the human society, the society becomes that much richer. That is the reason why the so called developed society or I would call them richer societies. They are rich because they have a thriving ecosystem where products continuously evolve, new products keep coming in and the users spend money to purchase those products. That is how the wealth gets generated. The second point about products is that the technology and infrastructure for use of such products has to be as ubiquitous as possible. Ubiquitous is a word which some of you might not have encountered. Ubiquitous is something which is present and easily usable. Ubiquitous is something you do not think about. You assume that it exists. Let me give you an example. All of you in the big cities at least in towns would be familiar with water supply which comes to your homes. You have a tap and you open the tap, water comes out of it. That is a assume. You do not look at the technology of the piping that goes behind that water supply. The technology of pumping that goes in order to pump that water from whatever low level to some high level tank, the design of that tank, the water dams at the back end which store water and supply you through huge pipelines. All of this, if you take each one of these, each one of these has large research issues. Somebody somewhere in the past has solved them and somebody today is continuously enhancing those solutions. But the infrastructure and technology has become so ubiquitous that you and I take it for granted. So, when I construct a house and I require to create plumbing and water supply, well, I simply ask the contractor, it goes to the market. Variety of goods and products are available. You and the designer, you and the architect choose that product, get things implemented and pack the water starts flowing. Same thing about electric bulb. Electric bulb has been a great innovation. But in your and our homes, we do not consider that electric bulb to be a great innovative product. We just consider it to be ubiquitous technology. When I switch on, the bulb must light. When I switch off, the bulb must go off. And we take all of this for granted. Consider the differences in the ubiquitous nature of the infrastructure and technology and the impact the non ubiquitous nature could have on the usage of such technology and products in our lives. Let us consider information technology. By the way, information technology is often confused with computers and networks and so on. I regard computers and networks as modern information technology. But information technology has existed for time immemorial. In fact, the development of human languages, because no other species have languages such as ours, itself is the first evolution of information technology, where information could be exchanged with each other. The most important information technology elements in the early human society were paper, pencil, pen, the writing instrument, where I could record history. Remember the Indian history again? The Indian history of information preservation was largely verbal. The teachers recited information and the disciples learned those recitations by heart, so that they could reproduce it. That is how knowledge was preserved for generation. The moment writing became available, the moment scripts evolved and were adopted, the information technology evolved to provide support through products such as paper, pencil and pen. Later on, typewriter and Xerox machines are some examples of information technology. As I said, computers and networks are modern examples of information technology. The sad part is that computers and networks are not ubiquitous and therefore, whenever we go into a large electronic shop, for example, we ask for IT section or we ask for computer section and we say, I want to buy some information technology products. Imagine you going to a small Kerala shop to purchase a pen. Do you ask for information technology section? No. You just say, I want this pen or you just say, I want a notebook or whatever. So, these products have become ubiquitous. Their usage has become commonplace and they are affordable to common man. That is the reason why those technologies continue to prevail and continue to proliferate and continue to be used. We expect that the computers in some form or the other will become as ubiquitous in so far as information technology is considered. In fact, many of us may not realize, but each one of us carry a number of computers on us. Practically, everyone today has a digital watch. So, a digital watch actually has a small computer inside it. Of course, the cell phones typically have computers with a very high processing power today. You take any gadget, you take television, there are microprocessors inside it. You take a car, there are at least 20 to 25 microprocessors controlling modern car. So, unknowing to us, some part of the modern information technology are becoming ubiquitous because they go far beyond conventional information exchange information capture. They actually can capture information from gadgets about gadgets and send them control signals to control their machines. So, now we come to discuss the research issues. As I said, there are research issues before, during and after. So, let me consider the cycle of the research. So, let us talk about early research. By the way, most of us as researchers and as research guides to students would be primarily concerned with research before and therefore, this slide should be an important slide for all of you to remember. Early research leads to technology development and product development. Sadly, there are not many places where basic technology development happens. Although we do use technology developed by others to do product development and that happens for a fairly large scale in India. In fact, it is this which has to proliferate. Engineering colleges across the country must do this in addition to their conventional educational requirements. I will speak more about the need to foster this early research engineering institutions on forth when I have the opportunity to deliver the validity address, but please understand that the research that happens in engineering colleges must encompass the development of products if not the development of technology. Innovations often begin in universities almost all across the world and early research leads to prototypes. This is something that must happen in India on larger and larger in order that this happens there is a need to encourage innovators. In the western and developed world like Japan or Korea, there are technology and business incubators. Ninety percent of the time these technology and business incubators reside inside an academic institution or are intrinsically associated with an academic institution. The objective of these incubators is to promote students or recent pass outs to form start up companies, ask them to submit ideas about any innovative product that they would like to develop further based either on their own research when they were students or on the research of others. It is not uncommon in the American and European universities for example that the faculty members who are doing research set up start up companies, take a sabbatical leave for one year and start working on that company full time. Many of their PhD students and some of their master students might join that after working for a year or two they may continue to concentrate back on their academics while that company goes on on its own. It is this mechanism of encouraging small start up companies to innovate that the encouragement is required. We did an experiment in IIT Bombay ten years ago when I had set up the IIT business incubator. So, we took some start up companies we took I had studied similar incubators in the west then notably at MIT, Stanford or in Texas and I tried to model that incubator around those lines. We had a huge number of applications you remember 1999 and 2000 where the years when the internet was in boom and everybody had some kind of internet product or the other to make self. Subsequently in IIT Bombay this IIT incubator evolved and morphed into a full place society for innovation and entrepreneurship. I will not spend time in discussing details about this society but I am very proud of this evolution. This incubator is considered the best in the country and one of the best anywhere in the world. It is called SIGN I have just given its website here www.SIGNIITB.org. Government of India actually liked this model and started inviting proposers to set up similar incubators on the same lines. There is a funding provision in the government where such incubators can be set up in any engineering institution of repute where some research is going on and where there are some individuals who are willing to drive this initiative. I remember having seen one such incubator in IIT, Suratkal and in some other places. So, those colleges who wish to develop such incubators and who wish to develop the entrepreneurial spirit further of their existing students and alumna might want to look at this site for how SIGN functions and might want to look at the large number of schemes including funding schemes which are available from government of India. In short then the research before takes place I mentioned universities by the way it may also take place in large R and D organizations of large companies. I do not know whether all of you are aware, but large companies spend a whole lot of money on research and not all of it is just product research. Several companies conduct basic research as good as or better than the research that happens in academic institution. IBM is one such notable company. There are companies in auto industries which do a whole lot of research although most of it is applied research. So, the research before quote unquote before happens as I said mostly in university environment, but it also happens in large R and D organizations of large companies. It is this research which leads to the early prototyping or early development of technology. If you have a facility like incubator or start up companies which are set up which do not have incubator, they start working on their own. Hewlett-Pekard for example, was a start up company which are set up in a garage. Of course, that garage was in this Stanford university. It so happens that today HP R and D spans a large segment of Stanford activities. Let me talk about the research that must happen during the product development. It is not well known and it is not well recognized that as the product evolves there is a continuous R and D that keeps on happening. Unfortunately, that part of the work traditionally is recognized as design and development work and it is well known that just as people say that for one unit of inspiration you require 99 units of perspiration in order to make something succeed. Similarly, it is a thumb rule that for one unit of research that you do 10 units of design and development efforts are required. However, what is not very well known is that innovations happen during design and development and even during production, even during manufacturing. This is something that unfortunately many of our colleague teachers are not familiar with and that is because when we join academics for some reason or the other we break our linkage with the industry. One of the most important things to foster research in academic institutions by the way is to reestablish these links and strengthen these links because a whole lot of research ideas can flow back from industry where design happens, where development happens, where production happens, where manufacturing happens a whole lot of ideas can flow back into the engineering institutions of our country. I will give you some simple examples of the innovation that happened during this design and development phase. The first example I consider is that of a multi tubular boiler. I do not know the younger faculty these days, but old time when I did my under graduation we had a five year program and the basic engineering courses were compulsory for all of us. So, each one of us had to do a course or couple of courses in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, civil engineering. Nowadays at least I know about computers as students because the reduction of five year program to a four year program and because the increase of contents to be covered in that four year duration. We find that the basic engineering courses somehow are getting diluted or moving out. I personally believe it is an extremely bad sign and as teachers we must ensure that whatever limited provision that we have in our syllabi to cover the basic engineering courses that provision is used to best of our abilities to inculcate the fundamental engineering concepts among students, but I presume that all of you are familiar with boilers. So, let me just briefly explain what a multi tubular boiler is and how it evolved. It is a very interesting I will use the whiteboard. Many of you would be familiar with I am sorry I am not very good at drawing. So, a water boiler you would have hot flue gases. So, hot air let me say there will be some fire here or whatever you can burn wood or you can burn whatever this hot air will go through this big pipe and as it passes the heat will be exchanged with the water here. This is this used to be by the way a typical household gadget in most of the houses not very long ago say about 40 to 50 years ago that is how most of the houses heated water for their daily use. The first boilers that were created and used in locomotives engines were exactly similar except instead of a water tap they would have steam coming out and that steam would drive an engine. So, the early steam engines used these kind of boilers of course, what I have shown is a vertical boiler. So, instead in a locomotive the boiler would be sort of lying horizontal apart from that the basic principle remains same. Stevenson when he was constructing a modern engine which he needed to be powerful this was I think 1989 1829 sorry 1829 AD in England there was a person called Booth who used to be there I will describe him in a short while who was part of the manufacturing process was part of the development process. And he said that look when we pass on the hot air through this the water may get heated, but less water will get heated on this side and more water will get heated here. So, instead of this why do not we do something like this why do not we have multiple tubes carrying the gases. So, here is the water and the hot gases will now flow through this basically what he was saying was common sense he was increasing this surface area which was in touch with water. So, instead of this surface area he had increased this surface area. So, that larger amount of water came into contact with hot gases and the steam that you got could be A larger could be B at higher pressures and so on. Originally some people scoffed at that idea saying no this is not workable because of variety of engineering problems, but ultimately this was adopted and this resulted in a engine which was named as rocket engine at that time. Please note I am talking about 1829 almost 100 years ago 80 years ago and please also note now the incidents of Mr. Henry Booth. Booth was not even an engineer he was secretary and an accountant in the company. It so happens that he was deeply interested in whatever was happening on the engineering side and he used to double in looking at the engineering diagrams that people made the production work that was going on and he would try to understand what exactly are the basic principles here. So, this innovation came from a company secretary who was in touch with engineer, but the engineers who are working on that problem did not think of this innovation. Let me come back to Mr. Henry Booth again. What am I trying to prove? Am I trying to prove that chartered accountants are better engineering innovators? No certainly not. What I am trying to point out is that innovation need not necessarily come from a mind trained in that particular field. Although 90 percent of the time that is what will happen, but we as innovators must keep looking around for people independent of their affiliations in the field and get them involved in whatever we are doing. You remember what Dr. Sam Petrola said yesterday that today's research is about solving very complex problems, each of which requires a multi disciplinary approach. It is wrong to assume that innovations during product development will only from the experts who are working on the product from one particular field. Great things about computer evolution could come from mechanical engineers, chemical engineers. I will at the end list some issues like this, which need to be resolved for product development. However, the fact remains that the major emphasis and the major impetus to innovation and research will come from the experts in that field. There is a very nice set of articles that Andy Grow has written on innovations during manufacturing. Actually, that is not the title or the main theme of his articles. Let me roll back and tell you more about Andy Grow, those of you who do not know of him. Andy Grow was one of the co-founders of the famous Intel company. Almost all the computers that you use deploy processors from one of the two companies either Intel or AMD and Intel has the largest share in the world in processors which go into PCs and servers. Andy Grow happened to be one of the co-founders, he was the CEO, he was also the chairman of the company. He is retired now of course and he spends time in looking at technology evolution. His major concern was that the American manufacturing has been dying for some time. Most of the manufacturing as you know is getting outsourced to China from the American companies. Apple for example has done a great job with its iPads but how many of us know that most of the Apple computers are actually produced in China, the manufacturing happens in China. So, for every one American who is employed in United States by Apple company, there are 50 Chinese or others who are employed for the manufacturing process. The argument of the Apple companies that look the high end design is what we do, the innovations is what we do, we control everything and only the low end manufacturing jobs are being done by outsourcing. What they forget and that is what Andy Grow has pointed out is that the manufacturing process when you do it over the years, huge number of useful innovations come out of it. Traditionally those innovations would flow back into the product design and into the research. However, if you disconnect your R and D and development from manufacturing completely, then the manufacturing innovations which will happen anyway but which will be learned by people who are involved in manufacturing and if in that ecosystem where manufacturing is happening, has an R and D component, has associated universities, then those people will benefit more and future innovations will start happening more in those places rather than in United States. If you just go to Google and I urge you to do that, search for Andy Grow at American manufacturing, you will get a series of well written articles there. What is the relevance of those articles to us? The relevance is that I want to buttress the fact that innovations and R and D innovations and research must happen and will happen during the product cycle as well, during the product not just product design but even in manufacturing and it is important to have an ecosystem in the nation which involves all of these things. In this context, just examine the kind of different product and the technologies and the part of entire ecosystem that exists in India. For a very long time, we did not do any basic research in technology. Technology was typically imported but manufacturing started here. Textile industry is one good example but when textile manufacturing started, slowly the R and D also started. Textile machines are now getting manufactured in India and are getting routinely exported. Textiles themselves have evolved. The textile making has evolved as an art. In fact, one of the institutions which is our remote center, DKTS, the institute in Nishal Karanjee actually started to concentrate on work related to textile issues. And whole lot of R and D continues to happen in that institution. Another way to say that just because you are predominantly an undergraduate institution and you have only few ME programs and very few PhD level people, it does not mean any way that you cannot do very useful research, particularly related to product development, product evolution and so on. So, I will raise my case that academic institutions such as ours, when they participate in research for product development, it need not happen only through incubators. It need not happen in the before stage. It must certainly happen. Engineering colleges such as ours must continuously try and build prototypes, try and develop new ideas, new product and that is why the innovations and the need for business incubators associated with each of our colleges. However, that alone is not sufficient once this product prototype is developed or if product prototype is developed at some other place, but there is a manufacturing facility near your college. Your college must then engage with that manufacturing facility, try to learn more about what is the discipline, what is the field in which that product manufacturing is happening and try to inculcate some relationship which will participate in research during jointly with such manufacturing process. So, that is a great opportunity and chance and we must move one step forward to participate in that kind of activity. Research does not end after a product is developed as a prototype or after a product is fully designed and it is being manufactured and it is being sold. Even after a product reaches the market and people start using it, there are a whole lot of research issues. What are these research issues? These research issues may deal with enhancement of features. For example, you might want to enhance the usability. I will give you one example which many of you would be familiar with. Many of you would have either used or seen a washing machine. Most of you would have seen modern washing machines which come with variety of controls. How many of you remember the early washing machines? Say 30 years ago, 40 years ago when the washing machines first came, the washing machine essentially was a container in which you kept all the clothes. There was a churner. If you switch on the machine, it will start churning. If you switch off the machine, it will stop churning. You were supposed to put in water inside. You were supposed to mix whatever the amount of soap that you wanted and the washing machine was essentially a big churner. There were hardly any other controls. Compare on the other hand the washing machines of today. The washing machines have washing cycles. They will preheat the water before the water is inserted into the washing machine. They will insert soap at an appropriate time. They may first rinse the clothes for about so many minutes. After that, they will dry the clothes. There may be multiple washing cycles. How are all of these things arranged? Well, the simple washing machine of yesterday's, which was essentially an electromechanical gadget, has now evolved into a gadget, which is controlled extensively by using information technology elements. So, there are sensors inside that gadget and there are actuators. All of these are controlled by microcontrollers, which are embedded into the washing machine. So, when you press one button to click, let us say one washing cycle of a specific description, what happens internally is a program takes over and then that program keeps monitoring the time on one hand and the various sensors on the other hand and keeps actuating either water inflow or the heating of the water or churning of the clothes or whatever. How has this evolution happened? This evolution has happened because after the product called washing machine hit the market, there were people who started thinking about how we can innovate and make it more usable, make it not just easier, but far more feature rich. And this was easily possible by marrying the modern information technology with the conventional electromechanical gadgets. I will once again repeat to you what Sam Petroda said yesterday. Multidisciplinary research is the need of the day and it is not required only for large and complex systems. It is required even for simple systems. Washing machine is a good example. A modern car is another example, where as I said a whole lot of microcontrollers control various features and functions of the car. Another reason for doing the research after is to continue to evolve multiple models. Some models may be meant for affordability, some models may meant for high end functions which may cost more, but there might be people in the society who are willing to pay more money to get those features. Enhancing quality is a perpetual job and that is something for which continuous research is required. Finally, you might find an existing product or a set of products, add something to it, combine these to form products for new applications. So, either the same product which evolves could be used for a new application or it could be combined with something else to develop new applications. It is not uncommon to define a process which requires multiple products to work in some kind of a synchronous fashion or in some kind of a sequential predefined fashion to achieve a final task. The most complex example of this is a chemical plant, where you have a from the input of the raw material to the output of the final product. The raw material which comes in multiple streams goes to series of processes. So, you require a whole lot of products there. You require mixers, you require blenders, you require reactors, you require heaters, you require a huge amount of piping, whatever whatever and believe me the research problems for a chemical plant will fall surpass even our imagination. Just to optimize only certain activities of that plant is a major issue. I remember my senior colleague retired professor Madhavan when he first introduced me to the optimization problem. I was quite surprised that the optimization problems required solution of not just simultaneous algebraic equations, but solution of simultaneous partial differential equations and when he says simultaneous he was talking about a 500 by 500 kind of system. Now, such mathematical modeling is mandatory in solving optimization problems of chemical plants. Our problem in the current environment of education and research infrastructure is that we have divided our education and research infrastructure into silo. So, if I have a computer science professor and if somebody else is a chemical engineering professor, he speaks another language, I speak another language and we rarely speak to each other. Therefore, he has no chance of knowing that Fatak might have great numerical solutions to solve this problem and I might have no chance of knowing that such and such hard problem is facing him and I am capable of doing some research and contributing. What happens? Chemical engineers end up learning computer programming, learning numerical methods and solving all the problems themselves and computer scientists remain within the ghetto of computers. They remain inside the computers not come out of them. This is just an example that I gave, but I am seriously concerned about the silos that are being formed in the minds of all our teacher colleagues across the country. These silos are required only to nurture the growing body of knowledge in a field, but the silos must be broken if you want to come together, collaborate with other colleagues, collaborate with the people in industry and work on the product prototype development, work on the design of product and work on the continuous evolution. Here are some examples of large systems. I call them large systems, not necessarily large products, but these products are so complex and costly that they require a large ecosystem around them. A typical product for example, is ruggedized and affordable communication switch. They are all familiar with exchanges, telephone exchanges. There was a time when the telephone exchange technology was heavily dominated by the west and what they used to do typically is that the most recently innovated switches that they built were sold in those societies and the earlier models were pumped off to developing societies where they genuinely felt that these societies do not need modern technology and of course, we used to pay heavily to them. I will again refer to Dr. Sam Petroda who at that time said that if I have to cause a revolution in telecommunication in India, then we must make these switches and establish them into variety of places, not just big cities, but towns and small villages. The first rugged rural switch came out of the research done at Seedod. That was the pioneer for a whole lot of other R and D and other development that happened. You know today where the country stands for. Of course, we continue to use technology which is developed elsewhere. World is such today that it is not possible for any societal segment or any nation to say we will use only what we develop. That is nonsense. The technology is global and it is globally available, but because of the capabilities that India has generated over the years, that technology that is available from outside India is now available at properly negotiated rates and the latest technology is available because the rest of the world understands that India will not accept something which is old. There are some large systems for which technology collaborations from other countries may not be available. Most of them are in the areas of either defense technologies or in dual technologies. I give an example of light combat aircraft. This work was spearheaded by Aeronautical Development Agency in the early days. It was led by Dr. Kota Harinarayana. What he did was involve more than 100 institutions across the country including all leading IITs, NITs and some other companies including private companies to do research on multiple aspects of the light combat aircraft. Please note that designing and building an aircraft is usually a 20 year process, but India has done it successfully. Take nuclear power plants. Indian scientists are designing these nuclear power plants, are building them and are innovating constantly. Many of us are not aware of it, but the nuclear power scientists in the nuclear establishment constantly work closely with the researchers in academic institutions. Sadly, most of these interactions today are limited to the IIT system, NIT system and some well known colleges. This needs to percolate down to every engineering college in the nook and corner of the country. Believe me, there are problems which anybody anywhere can actually contribute to the solutions of. Take automobile for example, largely the automobile design and automobile development was considered a western activity or the developed world activity, but Tata has proved that a car can be designed from scratch. I am not going into the details of how popular it is or how well designed it is, but the fact is a complete car could be designed from scratch in it. Drug discovery is another thing where pharmaceutical companies of the country are participating. Typically, drug discovery requires not only research which traditionally is done by pharma or chemical experts, but today in the days of bioinformatics, a whole lot of computational activity is required to contribute to this research. Typically, in any large system, there are many institutions which work on different aspects of the project. As I mentioned to you about the light combat aircraft, a strong coordination is necessary which is provided by a central agent. In case of the communication switching, it has been sealed out in the days when this kind of innovation happened on a large scale. For light combat aircraft, it has been added. All of these systems also require a very large and complex ecosystem. Remember I talked about investment and investor? Well, when you play a game of large systems, we are not talking about an investment of 10 lakhs or 50 lakhs or 1 crore or 2 crores. We are talking about an investment of 3000 crores, 10000 crores. It is obviously beyond the scope of small entrepreneurs and we individually or even collectively in the engineering institutions, neither can play this game nor can encourage young entrepreneurs to play this game. But it is important that when entrepreneurship starts and when research for product starts, then at least some people in our institutions should have an ambition to become that big. Please remember that companies like Tata's or Ambani's were not created overnight. They started small and they all grew into big places. Nearer home into my turf, you take Infosys for example, or you take TCS. I remember the day when the great Dr. Fakirch and Koli, the creator of TCS in some sense, some years ago had come to IIT Bombay and I had requested him to talk about the early days of TCS. And you know the talk that he gave was TCS as a start-up company. Today Tata Consultancy Services employ more than 2 lakh people across the world. They have by the way a large product development and R&D group in Pune and other places. But what is known is that they are a service industry like other IIT service companies like Infosys and whatever. However, when they started, they were just 8 or 10 people. That is how large systems evolve often out of small systems.