Freedom to fail in R&D is unfortunately absent in India, says Infosys cofounder Kris Gopalakrishnan

Kris Gopalakrishnan

Researchers must get the freedom to fail and unfortunately, that is absent in India, said Senapathy ‘Kris’ Gopalakrishnan, Chairman, Axilor Ventures and, Co-founder of Infosys. He reasoned that the primary funding for educational institutions come from the government, which is limited and insufficient to fund high-value research in India.

“Why do you assume that every single R&D (research and development) project will succeed, when you know that every startup is not going to succeed?  In India, unfortunately, the freedom to fail in research is not there,” Gopalakrishnan said while speaking at Nasscom’s Design and Engineering Summit 2024.

He believes that a focused research initiative needs to be created at academic institutions with guaranteed funding for several years.

He also gave an example of a human brain-mapping programme at IIT Madras, on which over 100 researchers are working and will continue to do so for many years to come. “Such programmes will produce world-class research, truly breakthrough products, technologies, research in the community. And we need to have that kind of ambition,” Gopalakrishnan added.

In May, Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy and Gopalkrishnan had called for a revamp of "archaic rules" that hinder the contribution of shares by entrepreneurs to academic institutions. “We have to change some of the archaic rules. For example, even today, an entrepreneur cannot donate shares,” Murthy had said.

Co-location of industry & academia

Additionally, Gopalakrishnan also added that academic institutions and industry should have shared R&D facilities if they want to create an innovation ecosystem. He gave examples of universities such as Stanford and Boston that function on similar lines.

“You can now bring two entities together - industry and academia - and they can walk to their lab. Students can work in apprenticeships, internships. We need to engineer these things,” Gopalakrishnan said.

When asked whether enough money is being spent on research by the services industry, he responded by saying that R&D in services firms are very different from that of a product organisation.