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Great job offers to students with campus patents experience
30
May'11
Great job offers to students with campus patents experience
Mayank Swarup, 22, will report to work for the first time in his life, in August this year. The fourth year engineering student of Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT) will join automotive giant Mahindra and Mahindra (M&M) at its Nashik campus. Swarup credits his blue-chip job to both his degree in industrial production, and a patent for an invention, a refrigerator-cum-water purifier, that has been filed in his name at the US and Indian patent offices.
"The invention was viewed as an achievement during the interview," recalls Swarup. In campuses across the country, from Mumbai to Manipal, students like Swarup are now being encouraged by their universities to not just create intellectual property (IP) but protect them by filing patents. These universities are hoping that this will unleash a new wave of entrepreneurship and innovation in campuses.
For example, in Manipal, an incubation body, Manipal University Technology and Business Incubator (MUTBI) -was set up in March 2010 to encourage technology entrepreneurship among students, faculty and local business. "Since then, we have filed 12 patents," says Manohara Pai, chief executive officer and secretary, MUTBI. These include five patents filed by students including one for a low-cost, high-magnification telescope.
At IIT Bombay, the traditional hotbed of student innovation in India, patent filings have become an area of focus in the past few years. In 2009, the institute filed 16 patents. That number jumped to 46 in 2010. By the end of March 2011, the institute had already filed 15 patents. "We have been filing patents since the 1960s but we have become very focused about it in the past few years," says Padma Satish, who is a part of IIT Bombay's Industrial Research and Consultancy Centre.
Incubating Innovations
This increased focus has seen the institute simplify its internal patent review process and bolster its team of patent lawyers who have been working with student innovators and faculty for the past two years.Beginning last year, the institute also started 'mining' the 650-odd doctoral and masters theses filed by scholars for patentable IP. "We kept these theses out of the public domain for a few months as we mined them for patents. We are filing 17-18 patents from them," says Dr Satish.
A thousand kilometers away, at the Amity University campus in Noida, faculty, students and researchers have filed over 150 patents in the past one-and-a-half years in areas ranging from nanotechnology to food processing. "Amity University students have already established over five companies. Over 20 patents have been filed by the incubator for entrepreneurs, faculty and researchers," says Atul Chauhan, chancellor, Amity University.
The spurt in innovation has not gone unnoticed. The patent for Swarup's invention, for example, is being filed by Intellectual Ventures (IV), a Washington-based 'invention investment' company which scans campuses worldwide for 'bleeding-edge' inventions, ties up with the student inventors and then licenses the technology to private companies.
In an email interaction with ET on Sunday, IV officials said that invention generation capabilities at Indian universities are "extremely high". "Our Indian office has always found high-quality inventions in India. In fact, we presented an invention from one of our Indian inventors at our annual investors meeting recently as an example of the wonderful inventions we are seeing from around the world," says Nicholas Gibson, IV's director for international marketing.
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