Today I was very fortunate to meet Dr. Swami Manohar who Co-founded PicoPeta Simputers back in 2002 in India, when tablets were a rare things and touch-screens weren't the norm. It was a time when basic mobiles were entering into the market and good old Nokia was king in it. Simputers made by Dr. Swami and his team were way ahead in terms of technology available at that time.
It was an informal talk arranged by Dr. Manivannan in applied mechanics department, and I happily went for the talk, which I now realise was one of the best interaction I had with people who have actually done things and have extensive experience of how things work in the academia as well as industry specifically startups.
Dr. Swami did his bachelors in ECE at Coimbatore, masters from IISc, Bangalore and obtained his PhD from Brown University. He then went on to be a faculty at University of North Carolina. And unlike others came back to India to be a professor in computer science department at IISc in 1990. For the first seven-eight years he was busy like any other researcher in getting his research published and attending conferences. Now he wanted to build innovative products and then came the idea of low cost computer- Simputer- a simple, inexpensive and multilingual people's computer. Dr. Swami and his team toiled hard for 3 years and made the product which had no less features than the current tablets have, its just the processor and memory which have improved now.
He wanted to make it commercial and the product also got pretty famous because of the advanced features it had and the kind of technology it introduced and showed the world that this can be done at affordable price. We had a personal or I should say people's computer which had full touch screen, accelerometer and worked on Linux kernel. This was something which India had but the leaders in Industry, government and the venture capitalist failed to see the future, they unfortunately lacked the vision which Dr. Swami and his colleagues believed in.
Dr. Swami wanted to convert this into a product based company and also thought every professor in the institute should have such opportunity. He was the first one to introduce faculty entrepreneurship activity at IISc which soon was being followed by IITs and other institutions in India. It was important to set unbiased rules so that neither the faculty nor the institute was taken advantage of, it took time but soon they had a set of rules. They started String lab, an incubation company under which they made one company which dealt with Simputers. Now they completely commercialised the Simputer and brought it to the market. It gained lot of media attention but unfortunately no success in market. The product was way beyond the technology present at that time,.
Dr. Swami wanted this product to be used for education of underprivileged and school children, he approached many giants like Infosys, TCS, HCL etc. and told them the vision they had. But to put in his own words Indian industry are very risk averse, even they were not able to get VC funding. There was time when Dr. Swami and his team approached government ministers including HRD, ministers praised the product but did not show any interest of using it for education purposes like they are showing now for Aakaash.
Now another startup was looming in the minds of Dr. Swami,he wanted to build a company which dealt with problems related to genomics, and use his computational prowess to solve their problems. From these efforts emerged Strand life sciences, incubating it in String lab. Instead offering the solutions as service, they would offer it as products which they can licence to other companies. This was one of the decisions which would have made Strand life sciences a giant in genomics bigger than Persistance only if they would have offered services which is essentially what every IT company in India does now.
In 2005 Dr. Swami left his job as a professor at IISc to concentrate on his startups.
The desire to make innovative products was so much imbibed in Dr. Swami that he wanted see thousands of innovative products coming out, there was only one way as he described, it was to help create the innovative engineers. He had known from so many years that the engineering education in India has been degrading, the entrance examinations and the coaching for it has ruined the ability of students to think creatively as a problem solver. With so much of experience in academia, he started to think and a new startup was formed- Jed-i(Joy of engineering design and innocation).
Engineers now a days are not given application based learning which is the most effective way to learn. You are given with a problem you can't solve, you just figure out the way to solve it and in the process the amount of learning you have can't be compared to the amount which you have in classroom based course. Hence Jed-i started a project based learning model for first year students in Engineering, the students taking part would learn to take simple things apart like a mechanical toy car, learn how it works, why these specific materials are used?, finally they make a system with simple fourbar mechanism controlled by motors and sensors connected to arduino which the students themselves code for. This gives everyone the taste of mechanical, electrical, computer engineering and the students move a step forward to become the actual problem solvers.
There were no few challenges for Dr. Swami while running Jed-i, the institutes weren't interested because according to them it does not affect their short term requirement- increase in placements. Top colleges thought they didn't need the program because they thought they don't need an outsider to tell them what to do which they have been doing best for so many years. They are yet to realise that the piece of paper they call the degree will be of no use, everyone will hire based on competence and projects and not on the course based learning. While the lower tier colleges only want the placements to grow as that of top ones, why they would wait for 4 years to bear the fruits of their investment? One of the hard truths Dr. Swami realised is that most engineering colleges are run by non academic people who don't realise what engineering is. Even if they were able to convince the Principle, the management team did not approve of the funds. This vicious cycle of engineering colleges has been hurting us and it seems they will realise their mistakes sooner or later when the hiring market completely shifts to competence based hiring.
The fortunate colleges which ran Jed-i were surprised at the results, and wanted to continue the programme. While some of corporates also took help of Jed-i to train fresh graduates.
After about a decade in the industry Dr. Swami wanted to return to academia, and now he teaches virtual reality course at IISc according to his model he developed at Jed-i. He also works at Microsoft research now.
On an ending note he shared his views about the startup. He thinks the number of startups coming these days won't last long unless they are technology based product startup rather than some e-commerce website which seem to spring from every corner of the cities. The vision of creating young innovators who will build the next generation of big companies is still his priority thats why he came to IIT to have this chat.
I thank Dr. Swami for having this chat and Dr. Manivannan for making this chat happen.
It was an informal talk arranged by Dr. Manivannan in applied mechanics department, and I happily went for the talk, which I now realise was one of the best interaction I had with people who have actually done things and have extensive experience of how things work in the academia as well as industry specifically startups.
Dr. Swami did his bachelors in ECE at Coimbatore, masters from IISc, Bangalore and obtained his PhD from Brown University. He then went on to be a faculty at University of North Carolina. And unlike others came back to India to be a professor in computer science department at IISc in 1990. For the first seven-eight years he was busy like any other researcher in getting his research published and attending conferences. Now he wanted to build innovative products and then came the idea of low cost computer- Simputer- a simple, inexpensive and multilingual people's computer. Dr. Swami and his team toiled hard for 3 years and made the product which had no less features than the current tablets have, its just the processor and memory which have improved now.
He wanted to make it commercial and the product also got pretty famous because of the advanced features it had and the kind of technology it introduced and showed the world that this can be done at affordable price. We had a personal or I should say people's computer which had full touch screen, accelerometer and worked on Linux kernel. This was something which India had but the leaders in Industry, government and the venture capitalist failed to see the future, they unfortunately lacked the vision which Dr. Swami and his colleagues believed in.
Dr. Swami wanted to convert this into a product based company and also thought every professor in the institute should have such opportunity. He was the first one to introduce faculty entrepreneurship activity at IISc which soon was being followed by IITs and other institutions in India. It was important to set unbiased rules so that neither the faculty nor the institute was taken advantage of, it took time but soon they had a set of rules. They started String lab, an incubation company under which they made one company which dealt with Simputers. Now they completely commercialised the Simputer and brought it to the market. It gained lot of media attention but unfortunately no success in market. The product was way beyond the technology present at that time,.
Dr. Swami wanted this product to be used for education of underprivileged and school children, he approached many giants like Infosys, TCS, HCL etc. and told them the vision they had. But to put in his own words Indian industry are very risk averse, even they were not able to get VC funding. There was time when Dr. Swami and his team approached government ministers including HRD, ministers praised the product but did not show any interest of using it for education purposes like they are showing now for Aakaash.
Now another startup was looming in the minds of Dr. Swami,he wanted to build a company which dealt with problems related to genomics, and use his computational prowess to solve their problems. From these efforts emerged Strand life sciences, incubating it in String lab. Instead offering the solutions as service, they would offer it as products which they can licence to other companies. This was one of the decisions which would have made Strand life sciences a giant in genomics bigger than Persistance only if they would have offered services which is essentially what every IT company in India does now.
In 2005 Dr. Swami left his job as a professor at IISc to concentrate on his startups.
The desire to make innovative products was so much imbibed in Dr. Swami that he wanted see thousands of innovative products coming out, there was only one way as he described, it was to help create the innovative engineers. He had known from so many years that the engineering education in India has been degrading, the entrance examinations and the coaching for it has ruined the ability of students to think creatively as a problem solver. With so much of experience in academia, he started to think and a new startup was formed- Jed-i(Joy of engineering design and innocation).
Engineers now a days are not given application based learning which is the most effective way to learn. You are given with a problem you can't solve, you just figure out the way to solve it and in the process the amount of learning you have can't be compared to the amount which you have in classroom based course. Hence Jed-i started a project based learning model for first year students in Engineering, the students taking part would learn to take simple things apart like a mechanical toy car, learn how it works, why these specific materials are used?, finally they make a system with simple fourbar mechanism controlled by motors and sensors connected to arduino which the students themselves code for. This gives everyone the taste of mechanical, electrical, computer engineering and the students move a step forward to become the actual problem solvers.
There were no few challenges for Dr. Swami while running Jed-i, the institutes weren't interested because according to them it does not affect their short term requirement- increase in placements. Top colleges thought they didn't need the program because they thought they don't need an outsider to tell them what to do which they have been doing best for so many years. They are yet to realise that the piece of paper they call the degree will be of no use, everyone will hire based on competence and projects and not on the course based learning. While the lower tier colleges only want the placements to grow as that of top ones, why they would wait for 4 years to bear the fruits of their investment? One of the hard truths Dr. Swami realised is that most engineering colleges are run by non academic people who don't realise what engineering is. Even if they were able to convince the Principle, the management team did not approve of the funds. This vicious cycle of engineering colleges has been hurting us and it seems they will realise their mistakes sooner or later when the hiring market completely shifts to competence based hiring.
The fortunate colleges which ran Jed-i were surprised at the results, and wanted to continue the programme. While some of corporates also took help of Jed-i to train fresh graduates.
After about a decade in the industry Dr. Swami wanted to return to academia, and now he teaches virtual reality course at IISc according to his model he developed at Jed-i. He also works at Microsoft research now.
On an ending note he shared his views about the startup. He thinks the number of startups coming these days won't last long unless they are technology based product startup rather than some e-commerce website which seem to spring from every corner of the cities. The vision of creating young innovators who will build the next generation of big companies is still his priority thats why he came to IIT to have this chat.
I thank Dr. Swami for having this chat and Dr. Manivannan for making this chat happen.
