 Hello everyone. Good afternoon, good evening, or good morning depending on where you're joining us from today. Welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for Short. Today we're pleased to bring you this month's installment of the E4C seminar series. The series is spearheaded by ASME's Engineering for Global Development Research Committee and its purpose is to intellectually develop the field of engineering for global development. We host a new research institution monthly to learn about their work advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and beyond. Today we're very pleased to have James Rajanayagam, Senior Project Advisor at the Center for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship at IIT Madras joining us. My name is Yana Aranda. I'm the President of Engineering for Change and I'll be one of the moderators today along with our colleague Jesse, Dr. Jesse Austin Brenerman. The seminar you're participating in today will be archived on E4C site and our YouTube channel. Both of the URLs are listed on the slide. Information on upcoming seminars is available on our site. E4C members will receive invitations to upcoming seminars directly. If you have any questions, comments, or recommendations for future topics or speakers, please do reach out to our team at research-engineering-for-change.org. And if you're following us on Twitter today, please join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C seminar series. Now, before we move on to our presenter, I'd like to tell you a bit about Engineering for Change. E4C is a knowledge organization, digital platform, and global community of more than a million engineers, designers, development practitioners, and social scientists who are leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges based by underserved communities. Some of those may include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy, improved academic culture, and more. We invite you to become a member. E4C membership is free and provides access to news and thought leaders, insights in hundreds of essential technologies in our Solutions Library, professional development resources, and current opportunities such as jobs, funding calls, fellowships, research collaborations, and more. E4C members also receive exclusive invitations to online and regional events and access to resources aligned to their interests. Please visit our site to learn more and sign up. E4C's research work cuts across geographies and sectors to deliver an ecosystem view of technology for good. Original research is conducted by Engineering for Change research fellows annually on behalf of our partners and sponsors and delivered us digestible reports with implementable insights. We invite you to visit our research page, the URL associated on this slide, to explore our field insights, research collaborations, and review our state of engineering for global development, a compilation of academic programs and institutions offering training in the sector. You'll also see one of our research collaborations highlighted here is in fact with IIT part of Madras, who we have joining us today on challenges related to dissemination of sustainable technologies in India. If you have research questions or want to work with us on a project as a research fellow, please contact us at researchengineeringforchange.org. And I'm so excited to actually share a little bit more about our 2020 cohort of E4C research fellows. What you'll see in this slide is our spread of incredible 25 fellows from all around the globe who'll be working with us as of now until early fall to conduct ecosystem research and investigate various solutions and deliver those research results for publication online, distribution to our partners and sponsors, and presentation at conferences. We encourage you to check out more information on engineeringforchange.org, forward slash E4C fellowship. We're really proud of our cohort this year and are always on the lookout for new applicants and new candidates. Now, a little bit about housekeeping items. We would like to give a practice to how we use our Zoom platform. Right now, for those of you who are seeing chat, please type in your location into the chat window, which is located in the bottom right of your screen. If you don't see the chat, just look for the chat icon and go ahead and click on that. We have already folks adding in here. Welcome from Montreal, Canada, Oregon, Ann Arbor, Germany, Kenya, Burminton, UK, Chennai, Scotland. Lovely, lovely. Welcome everyone. I am here in New York City. It's really great to see you all here. Welcome. We're thrilled to have you join us. Now, with respect to the chat window, please do share comments, anything you want to highlight to your fellow attendees in the chat. For questions that are directed to the speaker, please kindly use the Q&A window, which is also available if you look at the icon with little bubbles. So thank you again for joining everyone. We are thrilled to have you from all over the world. I'm seeing a lot of excellent feedback here. All right. And with that, I would like to introduce our speaker. James Rajanayalam is a senior project advisor at the Center for Social Innovation Entrepreneurship at IIT Madras. He is a sustainable development expert in the development sector with 14 years of experience in promoting a number of small industries and enterprises and other non-profit organizations that provide social welfare such as health, livelihood, and jobs. His course is in promoting market-based solutions for the development of social welfare indicators. I'm not going to read this very long bio, but I will say that he sits on the board of studies of a number of educational institutions and is a board member of the governing council of an entrepreneurship cell in a private higher institution. He has, as a textile technologist with an MBA in technology innovation management, obtained from Germany. He's a multilingualist and a budding writer of short stories in non-fiction. Welcome, James. We're so thrilled to have you. I'm going to now also introduce my co-moderator, Dr. Jesse Austin Renerman, who's an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan and earned his PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT as well as SM in mechanical engineering and a BS in ocean engineering at MIT. I'm also not going to read this entire bio, but I'm thrilled to have Jesse spearheading these theories. With that, I'm going to stop sharing my screen and turn it over to James. So again, everyone see the screen? Okay. Thanks, Sienna, for the introduction. And I also thank all engineering for change for this opportunity to share my knowledge, my experience in the field of technology transfer, particularly in the SPG context, whether it be for agricultural technologies or clean cooking stalls or clean energy technologies. This is what I'm going to share. And above all, first of all, my thanks to all the participants here for coming for this interactive opportunity. Personally, it's a luxury and I thank this kind of opportunities to interact because nowadays, since the lockdown, it's a luxury to me and interact with people from all over the world and it gives me immense happiness. So again, thanks for this opportunity to start with. I'm going to focus on this technology dissemination challenge in the SPG context. And what I am going to share is specifically from my experience with IIT Madras, particularly with the center of social innovation and entrepreneurship, where we have the center has been involved with a couple of other centers. One is rural technology action group at IIT Madras. And another group is it's a research center, Murugopat Chikya Research Center, which is a research organization from the Murugopat group. So we have been involved in the last couple of years for technology transfer for rural technologies. And we have been quite successful. And there are of course, challenges, which we are we are trying to overcome, particularly the engineering challenge, market challenge, and so on. So I will share maybe those. And of course, I will also share my experience in the VC sector over the last 15 years, where I have had opportunity to interact with a number of faculty from different engineering institutions for developing their products and transferring their technologies to either entrepreneurs. So that also I will keep in mind while sharing my experience. Besides that, I also a couple of things at the start is we are I'm not going to discuss about technology transfer for industrial applications. So this is not industrial technology transfer, but technology transfer for the communities. So the another difference to note here is, unlike technology transfer for industries, here we are talking about which is that one is transactional, but here we are talking about relational technology transfer. How do we build relationship in the communities with the technologies and with the entrepreneurs, mostly the development sectors, social entrepreneurs, and so on. So this is what I'm going to share. And my structure of presentation, I'm going to speak about my experience in the next 20 to 25 minutes. I have structured around the overview of all the systems in the technology transfer process, including the actors, the processors, and the users, and so on. And we will talk about challenges in each of the elements within this larger framework. And at the end, I will develop a framework for an effective analysis of breaking down the challenges, components of technology transfer process, and understand the reasons or successes, challenges in each of the elements that will help the academicians, policymakers, technologists, and anybody that are from the development sector on how to effectively address the challenge and then disseminate technologies for the benefit of the community and thereby address the sustainable development goals. Finally, I will also speak a couple of minutes about our own center, what we are doing, and then a couple of other initiatives at IIT Madras and in our community on addressing these challenges. So this is what I'm going to speak. The first slide is the overview where you see the technology dissemination. We have actors on one side comprising of technologies, the technology manager from the respective institution, and very often the entrepreneur. So they comprise the actors. I have removed the users, which are the core component of the technology dissemination processing to separate components because user adoption is for whom he exists. And that requires a separate mention. So that's why I have given them a separate element. And then we are looking at the process where we start with the purpose of design. We will look at the development cycle, how the technology dissemination cycle happens, and what are the challenges in it. And particularly I'm mentioning design for manufacturability, which is actually part of the development cycle, but which requires mention because this is where one of the areas where most of the technologies fail to address the manufacturability use of operation, use of working in the field. And finally, the negotiation part, how do we negotiate technology transfer with NGOs, entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, and so on. User adoption behavior, I'm calling it as user instead of just users, their adoption behavior as an important element because this will give an idea of how do they, the users, address the benefits with respect to or as opposed to the technologies view the benefits of the technology and so on. The ownership because very often the users or it could be individual users, such as a former or it could be a community ownership like a pond or a water body. And finally, the cultural factor, how does the culture accept or reject a specific technology, even though if all other conditions tick go in favor of it. So these are some of the elements of user adoption behavior. And the last point is for my own or the purpose of academicians or whoever is involved in the field, I feel in my personal experience there is a large wide gap of documentation of the successors, success factors, failures, lessons learned from the technology transfer process for the communities for the world. So that's why I have added these things. So in the next slide, we are looking at actors. So right from the first point, the technologies in my interaction, either in the couple of technologies where we have been currently dealing and also in my past experience, and of course, we did CSIE and the ECOC. We did a survey which I will speak about later. We understand from the various academicians technologies, the one of the main components of challenges for them is to lack of connect or disconnect between the technology and the market technology and the user. So these are two important points that each technologist must address before taking it further or even before starting a technology development cycle. And the third point is very often this is what we hear limited funding for post development. I am not saying limited funding for the development cycle, but there is a lot of requirements for post development where you need to develop the entrepreneurs, mentor them, and then make it happen in the field. So that is of course a possibility, a requirement, a challenge for funding scope in post development scenario. And next I come to the manager part. Here manager represents the institution from which the technologist comes. Very often that when the technology is developed by the technologist, so a manager, technology manager within the institution has a responsibility to disseminate the technology and here I see the challenges or how do, whether it's a full strategy or a full, whether to pull the technology, pull the users and the entrepreneurs towards the institution and the technologist or the technology to the user and entrepreneur and whether it is reactive or proactively go to the entrepreneurs and disseminate the technologies and managers play a very crucial role in this connection between technologists and entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur, the third important actor who takes care of the technology and actually disseminates commercializers in the field. Unlike again industrial enterprises, industrial transfers, here entrepreneur is a very loose term that I can, I imagine it's not a conventional or profit or a commercial enterprise. Here very often they are rural entrepreneurs, small business owners, NGOs, the nonprofit sector or the development sector or the very recent budding of social entrepreneurs who come with a mission to serve the society. So this is an entrepreneur with a different mindset, with a different requirements, and that's why they require a lot of mentoring support, funding, different kind of funding mechanism for them to take all these products into the market or into the field. So these are three important players with each with distinct challenges and when we come to the processes, we look at the purpose of design. Here again it's the classic dilemma for maybe the design thinking process, whether we have a solution and we are searching for a problem or whether we are working the other way around, we identify a problem and then work for a solution. So that's again a classical dilemma which technologists with specific expertise must look at. Then the next one is the development cycle as the development cycle as we address in normal technology or technology development process comprising of idea, idea prototype development, field trial, testing, commercialization and then market and so on. Here again it remains the same but there are a couple of changes unlike industries where you have specific units or R&D department that works on that is multi-disciplinary, multi-functional. Here we have the research for the technologists or faculty from the academic institution. She or she works with a constantly changing team comprising of research scholars, so research scholars and interested students maybe. So that forces a difficulty in terms of continuation of the project of the development cycle and also the time-boundedness of the technology development cycle. It could be either not so rigid or it could be very elongated scale. Multi-functional of course because in a purely academic or engineering technological institution the teams may not comprising of people from either from purchase or from accounts or finance or marketing sales. So that it again forces a challenge for efficient technology development or prototype or a minimum viable product. So these are some of the challenges and of course very often the design for manufacturability which is again a component of development cycle but which I want to address separately because design for manufacturability implies that many very often the faculty they do stop at the prototyping process and they go and implement in the field and it lacks of very often it may lack of user cooperation for the end user. It may lack also safety features and it is built with locally available materials. So the availability of these resources and materials these are some of the challenges and the actual the fabrication process for these technologies may not be immediately available and there is no very often the machines are customized. So that presents a challenge for the technologies in terms of design for manufacturability and of course the last one the negotiation where it takes place between the technologist and the entrepreneur. It depends on the entrepreneur and the technologist it's mostly attitudinal which says that very often the technologist may particularly I've seen it in grassroots innovators or innovators from the public they have a fixed mindset in terms of opening up their technologies for peers of intellectual property and so on. So that's again another factor challenge for this process and then coming to this user adoption behavior which is the important component what I would specifically like to address is very often the technologist or the technology is seen as when we address the claims and the benefits we address it from the technology point of view but user looks at a component a sum of what I see what I mention as the benefits of the new technology minus the conversion cost for the users from the existing methods to the new technology and also the benefits and the benefits from the substitute methods whatever be it whether it's a locally available substitute or any other any other substitute whether it be chemical or something anything the total user benefits should exceed the new technology benefits and that once that becomes significant then it's easy for the users to adopt new technologies and gain benefits from them and of course the ownership is a challenge because the community ownership lack of ownership and therefore lack of maintenance and so on it presents and presents a challenge and the last one the cultural that arises from the inequality divide either due to class or any other factors specifically to India the caste and the gender divide and so on that needs to be addressed here right into the right into the technology development process and of course this one I need not emphasize there is an inadequate or that is a wide gap for documentation this covers the technology transfer overview I will also to summarize again from our own findings which CSIE was collaborate last year it collaborated it guided a couple of fellows from engineering for change to understand the technology transfer challenges in academia so these are some of the reasons barriers that the fellows gained from one-to-one interviews with people from the faculty from the technology training studio and this again captures whatever I have said previously like business disconnect end user disconnect expertise within the team not technological expertise but market business expertise and then of course the end user feedback and the funding opportunities from government and various sources so these are again they collaborate our my own experience with what's happening in the field so with all these things I'm trying to give a framework on how to analyze the success factors and how to learn from the technology transfer process for the good for the social good so this explains there are six key parameters that I want to highlight one is the total benefit from the right side which which is an important parameter for the success factor or the failure for the transfer process and then we have not in that order of priority the market technology and market trade and then problem to solution which is again the second part the problem should fit the solution or sorry the solution should fit the problem and technology market fit how does competition work how do so substitute products compete with with the new offering so this one and then technology with respect to engineering fitness that explains how easy it is the prototype or the technology is for the end user to adopt use and replace so that's where the technology engineering fit is an important parameter and then also we have the technology manager fit how effective is the technology transfer process within the institution and of course and the last point is the technology entrepreneurship or not sorry technology entrepreneur fit where the technologist and the entrepreneur mean effectively they become a team and they remind together to address all the business challenges by through the combination of technology know how which the technologist brings and brings and the entrepreneur who brings the market knowledge and they effectively address and penetrate the market and reach the end user so this framework I believe will be useful again in my case in the next slide I have given listed out seven technologies without each naming the technology and also the faculty or the institution from where it comes from just to be confidential so here are from my experience at CSIE MCRC and my previous assignments these are some of the devices where I have technologies where we have helped we have tried to transfer through the with the help of development sector or rural entrepreneurs and to some extent succeeded if you look at the tick marks wherever all the factors except for livelihood machine where the p6 the use of benefits at this moment the use of benefits do not the total use of benefits do not totally exceed the benefits arising out of the livelihood machines but we are addressing but it's still the project is going on so that's the only idea but otherwise wherever when I looked at all these cases wherever all the ticks have been working then the chances of a good technology transfer and the community benefiting out of the technology transfer process has been good and in some in those cases where other fits even though the problem solution fit is there but there is no fit with either the entrepreneur or the market or the benefits the manager and so on if they do not work and then there is a chance of there is a very slight chance of succeeding in the market succeeding in the market and reaching to the users these are seven technologies that I can think of and we need to this is where I have been saying we need to bring lots of case studies on where these are the success factors and the failure factors besides that before I wind up I will also talk about the initiatives at CSIE the center where I represent a couple of initiatives where we work because we try to bring technologies either from within IIT Madras or from other institutions like what we have been doing with MCRC where we identify technologies and then take it to the identify rural entrepreneurs and disseminate and this is one area where we have been working for the last couple of years and we see good opportunities based on these parameters where we could succeed with respect to the technology transfer process other than that I will also mention very specific initiative about the challenge of addressing the market disconnect and user disconnect how IIT Madras addresses is through one initiative called center there is a center which which is called Gopalakrishnan based on a center for innovation which addresses the market disconnect and user disconnect challenge through a unique program called Incubate which in which the faculty who have developed products they are given a time frame in which they go around all over the places to identify talk with understand the users and then come back and say whether I want to pursue or not that's a worthwhile model to emulate for other higher institutions and other groups where faculty could be exposed to the users market and then they come back and start working from problem solution fit and go on so this is where our experience comes in and I would be very happy to have collaboration with CSIE with IIT Madras for any technology transfer initiative how do we bring technologies from wherever they are and then implement the deploy in our in our rural communities particularly for the agriculture sector water sector clean energy clean cooking and of course the lively for them so this is I conclude here and I will be open to questions later on all these aspects thank you thank you so much James we can go ahead and you feel free to stop sharing your screen and I'm going to turn it over to Jesse now to kick us off and I welcome our listeners to put your questions into the Q&A window as if you were there so over to you Jesse all right thank you first of all James thank you so much this is a great topic to talk about you know I've been interested in hearing from you since I read your report on you know the challenges to dissemination I think many of us recognize when you work in this field that you know the technology is one one piece of this right so you might have the right technology and I think in all the cases you mentioned you have the right problem solution fit which is generally how we think about you know technology development right did we solve the problem and what you're bringing up is like hey there's all these other actors that are part of this space that if you're going to realize any benefit from your technology you also need to understand how these actors what value is for them and how that happens right so this is a perfect topic um and very excited to hear you know you synthesizing your experience into this type of the framework so there's a question in the Q&A that I'm going to ask now but I think in general um I think we also all sort of know that there are different types of scenarios or strategies for having an impact and I believe that your framework is for one in which you have an organization and you're transferring technology through an entrepreneur to the market right so you've identified this so could you talk a little bit about how you think about whether a project is right for this type of framework so the question that was asked was you know an institution manager is essential for the tech transfer to be effective and I think that you know in your experience the answer would be yes that's why you posed it but I assume that's for certain types of projects or certain situations or markets or systems within which you're operating so maybe you could speak about how you identify like hey this project is a good candidate for this type of system so it's not all projects right but what are the types of projects where you say hey you know what let's go with the framework that you just proposed how do you identify that this is the right system slash framework for a particular like how do you go about that is it the problem is it the technology is it who's on the team I'm not sure how you identify that this is the if you were to save me Jesse use my framework when should I use it I guess is my question so maybe you speak a little bit about that sure thanks Jesse for that yes it is important to know which which whether I can apply this framework for all situations yes you're right no no in many cases no because suddenly there are I might have left out the government government plays a bigger role of all these things government is the biggest social entrepreneur they and they disseminate technologies in fact they have the capability they have the means they have all the possible all the things resources to disseminate technologies and they can do it and I have left them out specifically because then it's not just that it's not a technology transfer process the government take it up and then they deploy it it's a it could be a law it could be a it could be just a charitable so that way those technologies which are public road which are community driven which are infrastructure related for instance I have come across I will quote which I have not done here which but of which I had an opportunity to co-work which was effective use of plastic for road building so that it to some extent we did try to identify I didn't or locate entrepreneurs to see how they can build and then transfer it to say highway builders the road building contractors and say that ask them to use that but that did not work in many cases that has been slightly successful because certain governments took it up upon themselves and they use the technology offered by this faculty from South India to adopt that technology and build roads which have been good so public good is one a differentiator key differentiators whether this is for whether this is a clear public road or a private road and in another case is I may also say well again from my own previous assignment the it more or less looked like there was no fit with the entrepreneur and the technologist and the entrepreneur but in hindsight I see that particular innovator we facilitated technology transfer with the with an entrepreneur from the US the entrepreneur came all the way from the US to take this technology and disseminate but then the one the innovator said had the courage to say in spite of very good in spite of a very good deal he said no and at the time we were really very disappointed but when I look back now after 15 years or more than probably about 13 years later I see that has been beneficial to the society now I can say confidently I have been trapping sorry tracking the technology it has spread to all the continents particularly in Africa in Asia in Southeast Asia I'm not sure about Europe but it has been very good a decentralized model where the entrepreneur or no not the entrepreneur the innovator turned the entrepreneur became successful and it might have been failure if the entrepreneur had taken that particular technology and made it a centralized scalable proportion so in I would rephrase it in you know in a framework model if the technology is scalable then probably it is suited for entrepreneurship based model but if it is replicable then it may not so that's a great answer thank you for that insight I think it's it's really interesting you know I think this this turns perhaps on the definition of tech transfer right so if you think about like how a technology so you just mentioned several different pathways that a technology may get to an end user right but you're talking about specifically in your framework an entrepreneurial activity and for you you look at the technology and say okay is this a scalable technology is this something a company could make a profit on within a market-based system could we then get it up and you know have the benefits outweigh the cost and distribute it that way or and you've said there are other successful models whether that's a good where it's not possible to make a profit maybe it's like mosquito nets right where it's like we just want to get this to everybody because society it's a public good or roads the government needs to take ownership of this and there's a different transfer tech transfer model but your framework is specifically looking at these scalable entrepreneurial activities yes right um sorry this is what happens when you're in quarantine so the the next question that we'll have and then i'm going to mute so I could I could I could deal with this this question of push versus pull often we talk about this but then when we're teaching design at least within the communities that I've seen in development we're talking about okay code design really want to identify the the challenge but you've talked about hey you know maybe we just come up with a new technology we have some new physics-based thing we come up with Teflon whatever it is that has a lot of new performance and then I want to go see where that solution is what what problem this solution could be good for so how do you know when it's appropriate like you know you talked about scalable versus replicable for using this framework could you talk about a little bit about how you identify whether technology is like good for should I go and find a problem for this or should I go look at problems first so how do you sort of make that choice what is your thought process uh around that again uh uh I guess we need to so okay sorry we need here again the difference is whether it is um whether it is for the community or for industrial application in industrial application a typically a scientist or a technologist develops a new chemical new formulation or a new technology new machinery and then searches for different applications whether it be the application could be useful in medical technology in the field of medical or it could be for agriculture it's again different applications so you have a technology you have a solution you're looking for different applications and the application could come from anywhere the technologist might have developed a product for a specific um a specific sector or for application but in many cases it might be useful for different applications and this is what typically happens in the defense sector defense or space technologies where many of the technologies developed for space applications or uh defense applications like uh improving the self-life of uh pre-cooked food so they found they found applications in the civilian market later on for when the uh refrigerated systems developed or when we had the retail sector became a chain of superstores instead of a fresh food market so then we looked at solution and then we looked at the applications but here in the case of sustainable development goals or communities the problems are clear in front of somebody to see and the role of technologies or the faculty or anybody involved in the sector is to empathize the problem empathize with the community understand the pain point and use all the engineering and technological skills to develop a solution that fits the requirements of the community it may not be innovative it may not be a complete scientific solution but what we are looking at uh maybe uh I can also talk we can also think of prugal innovation where we bring everything together and then give it a solution just to improve the lives of those who are vulnerable communities so that's where I think the differences yeah that's great so uh I heard a lot there there's a lot there to unpack um but just if I was going to try and synthesize it what I'm hearing is uh first of all I mean it depends on where it's coming from right so if you're in a very sort of highly constrained like space or defense uh and you come up with a new technology that's really really high performance whether it's for food or for something else because you have like a really narrow problem that requires a lot of performance and you develop like a radical new innovation then you can start to say okay like hey let's go see if there are other applications for this among the problems that we know about right but in general when we're thinking about development it sounds like most of the time you're thinking about a market pull type project because you're looking at community level needs and how do we address success really is about addressing some quality of life issue um one of the things that that uh I wanted to ask uh you know thinking about your framework was that excuse me I'm sorry let me just finish this thought okay um the the frame about the framework was if I'm a technologist you know I'm up here in academia I'm working on this technology I heard about a problem I'm working with a community how do I think about generating evidence that is compelling to the other actors so when you talked about design for manufacturing or the tech manager or the entrepreneur so if I wanted to go to an entrepreneur and like pitch them on my technology right I have to have built up some evidence that says hey entrepreneur this is a good idea for you to spend your time thinking about the technology that I have right so how do you go about either making those connections between the different actors or if you were to give advice to a technologist I think one of the problems is I might as a technologist say okay like look I can show you the physics I've done these lab experiments like we've really solved this problem but that you know I haven't talked about profit yet and maybe the entrepreneur only cares about okay well what's the cost what's your scalability what's this and I haven't I don't have any evidence for that yet right so could you talk about your experience about managing between communicating between these different actors right and that that's something I would love to hear your experience because you sort of have this overarching view over all of them right I would rather it's not I will not share I would rather give an example of what is done to understand to address your question which is the center which I shared the GDC center for innovation which runs a program for faculty and the research scholars to understand the market first and also the users so they typically in about six weeks they go all over the places meet users talk with them see if that is a market and when they come back they present their findings and very often if you look at the statistics from the cohorts that they have been running for the last couple of years the faculty they come and they boldly say that our technologies do not fit the requirements of the particular user group so that understanding comes from enabling a space for these faculty to interact with the market to interact with the user which I feel very often the scientists the researchers the technologists do not have or which is not available in the government funding mechanism to go and understand the user to go and see the problem so that's where the first point is the more than yes of course there is a problem solution fit which is what you said that rightly scientists looks at problem solution fit if that's that then everything is taken care of but that's not so you have some you have to understand the role of substitute products the role of competition in the market the role of the entrepreneur and this for that there is no funding mechanism or any other private funding mechanism does not allow give you an opportunity to elaborate to explore other actors and this is where very often the technologists tell that there is a funding need and this is what I also believe that you cannot unlike industrial technology transfer process you give the technology and for that there is a royalty coming in and it's a responsibility of the entrepreneur to take it forward but here the in the case in our case the entrepreneur as well as the innovator they have to be together to understand the market to understand the user and then make the user use the product and benefit so it's upon the technologists to make sure that this reaches the community that's a that's a great answer thank you thank you for sharing that I think the you know it's a really important point one of the historical challenges I would say when you think about the these markets and having technologists interact in this way is that there's a lack of existing sort of market research right so if I was developing something for you know the U.S. market I could go and pay a company that has already done you know a lot of that deep understanding drawing out the insights they have data on the different existing markets these people have this much money to pay for this thing they have this problem and for many of these they're done so you have to you can't substitute you can't do it without that right so you have to go and either gather that information yourself or gain an understanding by going yourself as you're talking about and there's often like well what's the funding mechanism for that there's funding if you already have the technology okay great but how do I pay for you to go out as a technologist and understand this community understand the need at a deep enough level that you're confident that there's at least a potential market for whatever technology you come up with right you can make those design decisions with that perspective in mind I think that's a really great point and something that we should be looking to build on as a community is how do we create those spaces how do we create those opportunities for technologists to really understand understand the market so you know I'm glad you guys are doing that at CSIE I mean that's great we have somebody out there doing it and we just want to try and replicate that and get more of that within the community I think it's a really great point I know we're almost out of time so I want to make sure that if anyone has final questions for this we're seeing a lot of thank yous to you for this talk for the great presentation and I think it's a key issue that we've brought up here around thinking about the other actors okay you have a technology great but how do we get that to market and you have to think about that while you're developing the technology right you can't do it like okay I have the technology now let's go it's like no we have to while we're doing it make sure and be checking and validating all of these things so I think that's it's really great stuff I had one last question that I'd like you to answer which is I want to specifically think about working within different systems right and you brought up design for manufacturing or cultural you know all these other factors that you've identified which I thought was really great what I'd like to hear about is specifically manufacturing you know in the U.S. we have a manufacturing process depending on what size or scale you want you know I send my drawings I say here's the quote you know I give it to them they send it back to me they're like we can make a thousand by this date whatever right and I think that my experience in other systems is like you have to go and say okay well what processes are available right what can you do what is the level to like what are the tolerances you can hold and there's the back and forth where I actually have a different type of conversation with the manufacturer when I'm in Thailand than I do when I'm at with a shop in the U.S. right um and and they're telling me well what if we did it this way because we think we can hold better tolerances if we manufactured it this way right and like we understand what you want so we do this so can you talk a little bit about navigating these different systems and how you think about those things um I guess I will be limited because of my knowledge of other manufacturing systems in the world just as you mentioned the manufacturing system in the U.S. and Thailand but what I will try to say from my own perspective is probably India the concept of prugal innovation originated from India I guess uh if there is no other theory where the each innovator or the small business owner they modified the existing versions of available resources they put together the available resources and the mechanism which work which address the functional aspect of the user the functional aspect of that particular technology but what I mean by deciding for manufacturability is not just of course it needs to address the functional aspect of the technology which is to say that it has to have tolerances efficiencies input output inputs outputs components and so on but where we are lacking or where the technology developed in a community based system or for the vulnerable groups of society is these technologies need to come with more than the functional aspect but other aspects such as ease of availability of raw materials for producing those technology or the machinery availability of resources which are which could handle that technology say inputs and then safety aspects to for instance very often it could be the women who are using a specific technology it could be a agricultural technology or a biomass based conversion technology women or as you know as you have traveled in the in the Indian form rural forms it's mostly women who are employed in the sector and for them it needs to be designed for for those people for those users so that means how easy it is to operate how safe it is for the women or for those groups to operate these features are not addressed and it also it's also unlike there may be in other countries where I'm not there was a very good small mechanical manufacturing processes but here it has to be customized different ways of customizing using available raw materials available technologies it could be sources of electricity and so on so that's where the design for manufacturability needs to be considered in this particular context for for a better adoption way well it's so great and thank you for sharing those insights I'm gonna now James because we're really out of time but although I have many many more questions I want to give you a special thank you personally because I feel like I learned a lot I also want to say that you know in our in our prior discussion you had mentioned you know if people we have your stuff your contact information so if people have further questions either reach out to myself or directly to James I'm gonna hand it off to Hiana to to wrap it up but again just a personal thank you for me super interesting and really valuable for my for my learning much bigger apparently Jesse sorry that your your kid doesn't think you need to say anything more but I appreciate keeping you on time James thank you so much for spending some time with us I found it deeply insightful and I think CSA has such a great model for us to consider as we've all been sector at large and you noted kind of the hyper local context and we need to understand that and we need to invest in continuing those investigations and I think it's it's really a good reminder to all of us about what it takes to succeed effectively and to achieve sustainable development through the use of technology so thank you for everyone's questions I want to give a plug to our July presenter Dr. Jeff Walters who is an assistant professor for civil engineering at George Fox University he'll be talking quite a bit about wash energy food and engineering education at large so we're really excited to have him join our conversation next month do sign up for that seminar if you're interested and thank you to everybody I know we are time and I want to be respectful of that if we didn't tackle your questions please do send them along to us if you didn't catch the contact for James you can you're always welcome to send it to our team and we'll be sure to direct those questions to him thank you everyone enjoy your day stay safe wash your hands and we'll catch you on the next first seminar thank you thank you jessie thanks all bye thanks your time people