Building a Strong Relationship- Amity Bangalore

Last evening I attended a Corporate Meet hosted by Amity Global Business School Bangalore at there campus. I was one of the panelists for a discussion on the topic- Building Relationship for Corporate Growth.

This was an interesting and apt topic in the view the there's a significant need for collaboration between industry and academia towards mutual growth.

Amongst the panelist were:

S Janakiraman, the President and Group CEO of MindTree; V. Kovaichelvan, Senior VP- HR of TVS Motor Company; and Sushant Tharappan, Associate VP and Head of Org Development at Infosys. And self as the Innovation Evangelist with Wipro Technologies. The discussion was moderated by Prof. Narendra M Agrawal, Chairperson of Centre for Software and IT Management at IIM Bangalore. It was quite an interesting debate on how academia can add value to corporate growth and what corporate needs to do for nurturing academia. Here's a snippet from the session:

• Janakiraman (aka Jani) depicted the engagement types being short lived or strategic and the urgent need for the latter. The ingredients being- Shared Vision, On Going engagements and having a Long Term Impact. He depicted that how Wipro (he was the third employee there!) was incubated at the IISc campus way back in 1979. In Jani's view the three As for such a relationship are: Attitude; Assets and Achievements. Attitude calls for Diversity, Ethics and Depth; Assets in terms of having more Indian Role Models, Cross-pollination, India Case Studies, and Achievements in having a scenario planned for the future as well having incubation funding. A well received talk
• Kovaichelvan (aka Kovai) stated the expectation industry is having largely from the academia. He strongly believes that talent is selected for motivation while is taught skills. The elements involve: Curiosity, Qualitative + Quantitative aptitude, ability to Network, Co-Creation and above all Emotional Intelligence. He appealed the academia to look into assignments which are carried out right at the college or in near community, co-create internship with the corporate, students having pet projects and institutes being flexible in terms of take talent for the working professionals. His vast amount of experience and rigor was felt in his talk.
• Sushant took the discussion forward in terms of elaborating on the various programs at Infosys addressing the institute- academia relationship. These are the Campus Connect; InStep; SPARK and the Leaders for Tomorrow Program. The Campus Connect program aims at enhancing the employability of engineering graduates and aligning the curriculum to suite industry needs. The InStep program is the global internship for foreign university students that aims at giving a cross-culture exposure to students and Infosys employees as well seeking bright new ideas. The SPARK program looks at giving school and college students an exposure to the corporate world through a campus tour of various Infosys Development Centres and giving them an overview of the IT industry and on Project Management aspects. The Leaders for Tomorrow is a program that Infosys has with IIM A and Duke University to nurture the talent at leadership level.
• Pavan (self) spoke about the various experiments and experiences that Wipro has had around nurturing innovation at the grassroots level and how a few of these learnings can be borrowed by academia. These includes- WiCamp (un-conference on creativity with diverse audience); Innovation Bazaar (exhibition of inventions and bright concepts); Let Sparks Fly (a hands-on workshop with college students on creativity solving real business problems); and Story Book of Innovation (publication of bright stories on creativity from the institute). The key being having an experimental mindset!

Prof. Agarwal moderated the session very well drawing a right insight from his vast academic career and corporate life in connecting the dots and the need for academia to have more serious and long term relationship with corporate.