Science needs to learn risk-taking culture from startups

Senapathy “Kris” Gopalakrishnan, former CEO of Infosys, who’s now in charge of Infosys Science Foundation (ISF), speaks to TOI on the research ecosystem in the country:There’s broad consensus about science funding not being enough. What’s your view? Currently, an estimated 0.7% of the GDP is spent on research, about 0.6% of this is from the government and 0.1% comes from private sources. I would like to see it go to 3% of the GDP – 1.5% from the government and 1.5% from private sources. So, we need to scale up funding from the government approximately by two to three times and from the private side, including philanthropy, to about 15 times of what is being spent today. I see signs of this happening. Government funding is increasing, I see private funding also slowly increasing. Along with this, of course, we need to also think about mission-mode programmes with clear goals, ambitious targets and larger teams working on a problem. If we do that, I think we will have a great future. For Indian scientists, it’s not about our capability, it’s about resources that are directed and goals that are set for the community. medium87472459 In the long-term, what needs to be in place to encourage science? First of all, we need more people getting into science and scientific research. This has to start from school. We need to create curiosity in children to take on careers in research etc. Second, we need to ensure that we have enough students getting into PhD programmes. We need to have some mission for the nation to look at certain areas where we direct scientific infrastructure that is required and funding for that to ensure that the latest equipment, technologies are available for our scientists. I think all of these things are required in order to ensure that the flow is there into the system and to create numbers that are needed for a country of our size. What are some of the problems in the way science is done? I think what I’d like to see is a research ecosystem that allows you to take risks, whether that is in academia or in the start-up ecosystem. What is it that allows you to take risks and safely fail without it destroying your entire life? A lot of people tend to pick what is safe because that is more likely to be successful. There’s a carefully chalked out path for research in academia and when it comes to innovation, we don’t try to be transformative, we try to be incremental. That’s because we are trained to be risk averse, and we recognise that consequences of failure can be very high. So when we think of changing ecosystems, that’s what I would try to have as structural solutions. It is structural as well as cultural. What has changed in the last 10 years is that it’s cool to be in start-ups today. It’s cool to be a start-up founder, to fail at a start-up. Money is coming in, so I think the start-up ecosystem has changed to accept it. That’s high risk taking and a large number of families are accepting that their children will go into start-ups. A similar change must happen in the academic and the research environment allowing one to take highly risky, ambitious projects and then try and succeed. Some of these are very long term, so there’s a commitment required for maybe 10-20, sometimes 30 years. Do you see private investments in science increasing? I’m seeing an increased interest in funding research. Tata Trusts have been one of the early investors in research in scale. I see that increasing but more needs to be done. During the pandemic, industry, academia and the government all came together to address the lack of medical infrastructure at such speed. So, I think we have examples of collaboration. We have examples of how regulators change the regulations to speed up approvals and things like that. So we just need to take these lessons forward, the confidence that we have got during the pandemic and say that investment in science is very, very important for our country and make those investments necessary. I’m also sure that international investments into our research ecosystem will also happen if we again interconnect our research ecosystem with a global research ecosystem. We need to connect our systems, processes and institutions to the global ecosystem and infrastructure.