Students’ innovations to be taken to next level

CHENNAI: Taking note of the fact that most innovations by engineering students are not able to reach the next level involving viability and commercial utility, the State government has decided to equip the students to showcase them for public use.

As part of their academic projects, final year engineering students have to apply their skills and competencies acquired through engineering and technology education to create innovations. However, more than 100 projects from each engineering college end up being junked every year due to the inability to take them to the patent level, said a senior official from the Directorate of Technical Education (DoTE), who blamed it on several issues, including not creating awareness among students.

Because of this, students spend long hours attending workshops and taking part in discussions but without any new ideas yielding at scale. To address this, the directorate has advised engineering colleges to take up a project titled ‘Ideation Sprint’, he said.

“The project aims to organise regular innovation boot camps providing students with the guidebook to ideate, build and deploy useful, usable and technically feasible solutions that the customer will be willing to pay for,” he explained, adding that the technologies developed by students would be as per industry requirements.

The government engineering colleges in Tiruchy and Tirunelveli have already launched the Ideation Sprint programme for more than 800 students, the official said. This would be implemented in other State-run institutions in the coming days, he added.

Patent information centres have been set up at all the State-run varsities to encourage research activities. “Anna University secured 18 patents in the last academic year, while other universities secured about 10,” he said.