Ashok Jhunjhunwala is Institute Professor at IIT Madras and the guiding force behind IIT Madras Research Park (IITMRP), India’s first university-based research park.
IITMRP is a key contributor to India’s deep tech ecosystem. Spread over 1.2 million square feet of workspace, it has more than 70 research and development partners and has filed more than 1200 patents. It also houses the IIT Madras incubation cell, the Rural Technology and Business Incubator, a MedTech incubator, and a Biotech incubator. It is a hub for industry-academia collaboration, based on the deep experience and track record of Prof Jhunjhunwala.
Jhunjhunwala spoke to indianexpress.com on the challenges of incubating deep tech startups in India, the grind and the hardships that startups face in the earlier years, and the need for perseverance and learning it the hard way. Edited excerpts:
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Can you tell us about your journey with IITMRP and the incubation centre? Can this be replicated elsewhere?
Ashok Jhunjhunwala: We have incubated more than 370 startups and the combined valuation
of these startups is now at Rs 60,000 crore. It is a long and tough journey. The key is passion and perseverance. Another important thing is that we are self-sustaining and not dependent on government funding. We were the pioneers in industry-academia interaction in India. In the early days, I used to take our students from IIT Madras, visit industries, find out their requirements and see if we could solve some simple problems. We used to go with an open mind, at times not even knowing whether our solutions would work. We were very transparent with the industry too, telling them that our solutions may or may not work, but that is the way to learn.
There are instances in the early days, when industry in Chennai could not afford costly replacements of machinery or expensive repairs with the need to fly in engineers from abroad to work on the machinery. We stepped in and said that we could give it a try; there was no money involved, only a spirit of innovation. We solved some intractable problems, free of cost, and this is when the industry took us a bit seriously. You might have a lot of degrees, but unless you solve some problem, you are not taken seriously. But if you solve some of their problems, the word gets around and they come back for us to solve bigger and more complex problems. That’s how academia-industry linkages were built at IIT Madras and the research park. It is a tough task. It also cannot be done in a hurry. Moreover, one has to build the climate, the incentives and the trust with industry.
On the question of whether it could be replicated elsewhere, it can be but this is the playbook. But if you just want to throw money at the problem, and hope that it would work, you are mistaken. You must understand that easy money always hurts. At our incubation centre too, we don’t want to hand over money, and make it easy for the startups. It is a vicious cycle. If you are accustomed to easy money first, then you would want it all the way. Why would the venture firms want to give away money, and even if they do, what would happen when the product reaches the consumer? Would the consumer want value or would he want to give away money just because it is a startup? So unless startups learn it the hard way, they cannot survive.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Can you tell us about the challenges the Indian innovation ecosystem faces? Have the incubators, accelerators, challenges, grants and awards been able to deliver?
Ashok Jhunjhunwala: The government has gone ahead and set up many research parks. Many of them are not successful. Taking money from the government and surviving on that alone is not going to help. The focus should be on identifying the right faculty and creating industry linkages, which is missing. So much money has gone into these initiatives and so little has come out of it. There are some success stories too. However, for the money that has gone in, the returns are inadequate. In our case, we put in very little money and a lot has been achieved.
When we come to incubators, many of them are dependent on government funding. It can do more harm than good. Money cannot solve everything. It takes time. We need to persist with startups and ideas. Sometimes it takes eight years to see the light of the day. We should be ready for such long gestation periods. For example, our Rural Technology Business Incubator has come out with great products but it is sixteen years old. You must know that we do not teach entrepreneurship in our colleges or universities. Very few of the faculty can mentor startups or build new products. The key is to identify them and work with them, and we have to keep experimenting and learning. We are very tough with our incubatees, we treat them as our children who need to be disciplined, and they are fit and capable when they leave us.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: How easy or how difficult is it to raise funds for a deep tech startup in India? How robust is the VC ecosystem around deep tech?
Ashok Jhunjhunwala: You must understand that raising money for any venture is the same. You need to convince those who are putting their money that it is a worthwhile venture, and their money will get decent returns. That is the key. If you are not able to sell your idea, then it may not work. If you received some easy money in the earlier stages, you would be expecting the same later on too. That is why I say that easy money, at any stage, does not help much. It would only create an illusion of growth or that things are moving, and when the easy money stops, it stops too.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Where do you see the Indian startup ecosystem five years from now? How much of an impact will AI have on the same?
Ashok Jhunjhunwala: AI would be a tool and going forward it would become indispensable. It was like having a computer or laptop a few decades ago. It was perhaps a novelty then, it is no longer the case now. In the same way, if you do not have basic MS Office or Excel skills, it would be difficult to survive now. It would be the same in the future too for AI. AI usage would be the new normal going forward. But it would be difficult to guess right now as to how much of an impact AI-centric companies or fundamental AI-centric innovation would achieve.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Can you name your favourite tech-enabled social impact initiative?
Ashok Jhunjhunwala: It is UPI and the digital payments system that it enabled. While I was on the board of State Bank of India, I had a simple question for them. What would it cost the bank, if the depositor were to withdraw Rs 5000? The answer was: Somewhere in the range of Rs 70 if he were to withdraw from a branch of the bank, Rs 12 if were to withdraw from an ATM, and Rs 2 if it were to be a credit card transaction. The path was clear. Digital payments were the way forward for banks. Then the issue of frauds came up and OTP through mobile innovation came up. Then, we created the Mobile Payment Forum of India, an umbrella organisation which was responsible for deploying mobile payments in India, where I was the chairman for six years. It was here that the protocols for mobile transactions were written. I see UPI as the biggest social impact story to come out of India. There are other significant innovations too in wireless telephony, electric vehicles and work done for eliminating power shortages in rural areas. Now, one of our teams is working on a novel tech which would dramatically eliminate travel time within a city, and would be cost-effective and sustainable too. I think this tech and this product would be a gamechanger. It is named HASHTIC (High-throughput, Autonomous, Sustainable Human/Goods Transportation for India’s next Century) . It envisages moving people from one point to another in a cost-effective manner. The transportation system should be able to take people from home to office in just 20 minutes in any city. It should use less energy than a scooter to transport someone to his office. You must understand that transportation through water or on rails would be the cheapest, while anything on roads like cars or on air like planes are expensive
There are also various problems that tech could be applied to in an Indian context. For example, there is this issue of distribution of drinking water in cities. Some people get sufficient water and some don’t due to a variety of reasons, including issues of pumping efficiency. An interesting idea would be to determine an optimum level of water to be pumped even to individual households and individual water tanks and the water then being switched off for those users, after it reaches an optimum, while it would increase the pressure and availability for a different set of users. It is perhaps an interesting problem to solve. It has not been fully ideated at this scale yet, but one could develop and deploy it in, say, five years. A new supporting tech of valves and sensors has emerged in these areas, which could help resolve the problem. Who knows, one could even have the city government decide their optimum water supply level on a day-to-day basis, and users could adjust to the same. If someone wants to buy water, it could be expensive enough above the optimum, and maybe there could be a market for sale and purchase of water after the minimum optimum level for all citizens.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Are we giving too much importance to e-commerce startups, ignoring others?
Ashok Jhunjhunwala: We do not work on e-commerce and we have not built expertise in the matter. However, if there is a market, and people are willing to pay for a service and there is someone servicing the same, it should be fine. I have found numerous examples where e- commerce or e-commerce plus logistics firms have resolved great consumer pain points. It may not be very deep tech, but that is fine. It has a market, and it solves some pain points. That is what we need to see. It also has had a positive impact on jobs and small enterprises.
Publication: The Indian Express
Read the full article at:
https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/easy-money-is-a-hurdle-to-tech-innovation-prof-
ashok-jhunjhunwala-iit-madras-9492792/