IIT-Kharagpur launches innovation centre

Named after its alumnus and former faculty, the M N Faruqui Innovations Centre was launched yesterday with seed-funding by another alumnus Arjun Malhotra, the co-founder of HCL technologies, officials said.

The centre would promote the culture of innovation among a wide cross section of students and faculty with support from its alumni and the industry, they said.

Understanding that today's innovations is not related to any specific domain or discipline, they said this centre was being set up to encourage and encompass multi-disciplinary interactions between students and faculty at all levels of education, undergraduate, postgraduate and research.

The Innovations Centre comprises a Design Facility and Tinkering Laboratory.

While the Design Facility of the Innovations Centre supports a meeting, brainstorming and conferencing centre with Computing and Information Technology aiding its activities for all those involved to generate new product concepts and ideas, the Tinkering Lab provides a venue to make and experiment with various components to realise these into novel products or systems.

The Tinkering Laboratory has collaborative conferencing tools, 3D printers, a mechanical workshop with fabrication machinery, electronics workbenches, PCB fabrication set-ups, and prototyping tools for embedded systems among others.

In addition, there is support to train students in trans-disciplinary areas at early stages of engineering studies and will be linked to the curriculum with project- based learning.

Faculty may also involve students from different streams to help them realize novel ideas being generated in this process, they said.