I thought I would do a small thread on what actual fostering of innovation do looks like in the developed world. Many have said that 'jugaad' too is a form of innovation and must be celebrated. I beg to differ. It works for them, good but not something to be celebrated. (1) https://twitter.com/cvkrishnan/status/1298589173293539328

So I thought I would focus on one of the emerging areas of research which is autonomous and connected cars. This is an area that may not necessarily be relevant to India in the conventional sense but one never knows where any thing could be useful. (2)

I'd like to take you to the automotive capital of the world, which is Detroit. Ann Arbor, a university town an hour's drive away, is the home of the famed University of Michigan. It has what is called the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) (3)

This research center is famous for its pioneering work in the emerging fields of transportation like vehicle design, transportation modeling, accident reconstruction etc. One of it's primary research focus areas is Connected vehicles. (4) http://www.umtri.umich.edu/our-focus/automated-vehicles

Here they not only work on a product level research, but actually go to defining the paradigm of connected & autonomous vehicles(CAV)) and setting out the standards and policy. The govt has funded a minimum of $150 million annually for CAV research. (5) http://www.umtri.umich.edu/what-were-doing/news/funding-new-transportation-revolution-liu-congressional-testimony

It is on this funding base, the academic research environment thrives. To add to the research infrastructure, the UMTRI already has many labs across, ergonomics, occupant safety crash testing and has access to the test facilities of Ford, General Motors & Chrysler in the area (6)

Enters the private sector. Within this setup, Ford has created the Ford Center for Autonomous Vehicles(FCAV). This center is specifically involved in multidisciplinary research in modeling sensors, predicting pedestrian movement, depth perception (7) https://fcav.engin.umich.edu/research 

trajectory design and modeling, LIDAR research, thermal vision for robots, traffic modelling fro autonomous vehicles, machine learning based vehicle AI modeling etc. The research is essentially not just broad, but deep and interdisciplinary for each variety of sub systems (8)

The center piece of this effort is the MCITY. It is a test track mimicking a city block designed to test newly developed autonomous and connected vehicles, both from within the university and for private startups and companies. (9) https://mcity.umich.edu/our-work/research/

This is a test track that is fully instrumented with state of the art sensors and measuring devices, with various areas for different kinds of testing like vehicle dynamics and control, roll testing, skidpad for break testing, city block for turns etc. (10)

All of this comes with the backing of supercomputing facilities and an outstanding bunch of faculty and researchers who work on the frontiers of tech funded and fostered by the industry. This has multiple effects for students and researchers who get exposed to frontier tech (11)

The dividend for the industry is multiple. It gets access to fantastic test facilities, outstanding research output to add to their multi-year product development effort and supply of quality graduates familiar with the tech and ready to work directly (12)

All of this is missing here. The vision, the investment, the fostering of the ecosystem, the pursuit of own technology development from subsystems to systems level. The end scenario is a dismal ecosystem of careerists with chalta hai attitude working to just please their managers

All picture credits, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

@chandanprasad the research SEZ that you asked for that is what these university towns are. Ecosystems of research in an already free market country. Ann Arbor, Palo Alto, Urbana Champaign, State College, College Station, Blacksburg, all university towns and centres of research