................................................................................................
Why Japan's R&D scores over ours
R. DINAKAR
Indian industry has shown little interest in overtures from public sector R&D labs.
Unlike in Japan, India's ivory-tower scientists are wary of working closely with private companies and factory workers.
Institutions dedicated to public research & development (R&D)
activity often exist in a world far removed from the rough-and-tumble
arena of private enterprise. To some, the very idea of using taxpayers'
money to enrich the business class goes against the notions of equity
and social justice.
One can, however, learn from the Japanese, who have created interesting
institutional mechanisms to deal with this issue. Take the case of
Koguchi-san, a young, mid-level scientist and troubleshooting ‘scout',
working with the
National Institute of Material Sciences (NIMS), a
government-funded research lab located in
Tsukuba Science City, 60 km
north of Tokyo. On most days, you will not see him in his comfortable
NIMS office, but on a factory floor elsewhere. Dressed in overalls and
boots, he rubs shoulders with workers, technicians and scientists at a
private manufacturing firm — usually an SME — trying to understand their
technical problems, to make their manufacturing processes more
efficient and their products more competitive.
Typically, discussions continue after office hours. Koguchi-san and his
counterparts hang out together, share a drink or a game of baseball
during the weekends. In the process, they build a camaraderie that is
very valuable for their parent organisations. Jointly-funded projects
emerging from such friendships have resulted in better alloys, stronger
adhesives, superconducting magnets, super-capacitors, dye-sensitised
solar cells, and a host of other specialised products that Japan's SMEs
supply to the bigger
keiretsu conglomerates as well as global markets.
THE INDIA CONNECTION
Koguchi-san is a fictitious character. But NIMS is very real. So are the
kind of working-level R&D partnerships that exist between Japanese
public-funded labs and private-sector companies described above.
NIMS employs nearly 50 Indians. Most of them are post-doctoral fellows
from our own premier universities and
research institutes, with whom it has inked MoUs, and also offers ‘joint graduate' programmes.
Researchers from India and other countries spend a few years here
working on focused research projects. The intellectual property rights
(IPRs) resulting from this, of course, belongs to NIMS and the Japanese
companies.
What is of interest for us here, though, is not ownership of IPRs or
even the Indian connection. It is about public-private partnerships
(PPP) aimed at meeting the needs of the domestic and international
markets, that can be useful for Indian industry as well.
STATE AS CATALYST
The Government has a critical role in this process — not by establishing
newer institutes and perpetuating a bureaucratic paralysis — but by
acting as a facilitator and catalyst. Another fine example to quote here
is the case of
Hiroden in Hiroshima.
Hiroshima — long before it was devastated by the atomic bomb codenamed
‘Little Boy' — was home to a tramway network run by this company called
Hiroden. Their network was among the first utilities to be rebuilt after
the attack. The city gradually became famous as a ‘living museum of
tramcars'. In 1999, the local manufacturers got a rude shock when
Hiroden decided to replace its aging fleet of single-car trams with the
latest imported German models.
Manufactured by Siemens, these were the sleek
LF-LRT (Low Floor-Light Rail Transit) Combinos. Their modular, barrier-free, interconnected and
low-floor design not only had a much bigger capacity, but also made
passenger movement easier and faster.
Japanese tram makers had refrained from improving their designs for
several reasons till then: Overseas manufacturers held patents for many
of the basic technologies and the low domestic demand increased
development risks.
This changed in 2000, when a new
Barrier-Free Transportation Law was
brought in by the federal Government. It provided tax relief and
exemptions to compensate for the price difference between conventional
cars and the more expensive barrier-free designs.
In 2001, two years after Siemens had won the Hiroden contract, Japan's
Ministry of Land Infrastructure and Transport got together a group of
eight manufacturers to come out with a 100 per cent Japanese product. It
eventually led to three of them —
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries,
Kinki Sharyo and
Toyo Electric Co. — forming a consortium,
JTRAM, for creating
an improved tram better suited to Japanese conditions. MHI produced the
bogies, brakes and inner/outer riggings; Kinki Sharyo focused on the
design, car body, articulations, and driver's cabin; and Toyo took
responsibility for the electrical parts and control drive units.
The result was ‘
Green Mover Max', a vehicle that had more seats, wider
aisles and lower dependence on foreign technology and component-makers
than the Siemens Combinos, which, meanwhile, started developing
problems.
In 2004, the German company admitted that their body-shells were
developing cracks after high mileages (15,000 km-plus). By now, JTRAM
was ready and waiting. In 2005, Hiroden accepted the first LF-LRT built
entirely in Japan. And today, JTRAM not only dominates the local market,
but also gives Siemens a run for its money in the international
markets.
TWO-WAY STREET
In India, the Japanese PPP model — which we have seen at work even in
the more recent period — would be looked upon with a mixture of
suspicion and disdain. Our scientist-administrators are wary of working
closely with private companies or discussing technical problems with
mere factory workers. What is the point in soiling one's hands, when
promotions are linked to more ‘intellectual' activities like filing
patents or publishing papers — preferably in Western journals!
There are, of course, exceptions that are often the result of one-off
individual initiatives. The rice miller, Anil Mittal's chance visit to
the
Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi turned a promising
basmati strain called Pusa-1121 into a commercially-cultivated variety
that now earns India more than $1 billion in annual export earnings.
But in many cases, it is industry that has shown little interest in
overtures from public sector R&D labs. When the
Central Mechanical Engineering Research Institute at Durgapur found no takers for its
indigenous tractor design in the late 1960s, its own scientists led by
Chandra Mohan took the lead to commercialise ‘Swaraj' tractors through
Punjab Tractors Ltd.
On the other hand,
a CSIR laboratory tried to collaborate with the
cashew industry in Kerala, to jointly develop a better technology for
mechanical roasting and peeling of raw nuts. But high-level discussions
yielded nothing, as the industry was happy working with cheap labour.
Today, high labour costs have forced mechanisation and cashew makers
import the necessary equipment — from Vietnam!
A top-down approach has been a characteristic of our public-private
interactions in R&D. It is high time we created incentives for our
middle-level managers to seize the initiative. If, as with Koguchi-san
at NIMS or the people at JTRAM, our R&D institutions make concerted
efforts to build relationships and to understand the industry's needs,
India too, can emerge as a hotbed of innovations.
It's time we stepped out of our institutional silos and stirred an
inter-disciplinary cauldron of ideas. Our academics need to step down
from their ivory towers, roll-up their sleeves, and empower their
younger colleagues to bridge the yawning gap between ‘research' and
‘development' in India.
(The author is an independent technology transfer consultant.)
(This article was published on November 23, 2011)
