Infosys attends colleges to brush up on innovation

A new management at the helm and a strategy in place, Infosys, India's second-largest information technology (IT) services company, is taking a relook at the way it allies with academic institutions.

The Bengaluru-based company, which traditionally engages with international and Indian universities for research and setting up of chairs in subjects, is seen exploring ways to take these partnerships to the next level by seeking joint business opportunities.

One recent example is Infosys's engagement with the Design School at Stanford University, California. While the school is helping Infosys employees, teams from Infosys and the design school are also conducting design workshops for clients.

This is part of Chief Executive Vishal Sikka's strategy to drive design thinking within the organisation to explore avenues.

"During the last three months, we, with the teams from the Design School, have conducted five or six workshops for some clients. These have gone down quite well with them," said U B Pravin Rao, the chief operating officer.

"While our strategy at a broader level remains the same, some of the thinking in terms of partnerships are relatively new. While we have had partnerships, I think the extent of the partnerships we are talking about now is probably different," Rao added.

So far, the team has imparted training to 5,500 employees of Infosys, who will train the rest, according to sources.

Infosys has partnered the Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering in Stanford to develop the curriculum for data science and analytics, apart from conducting joint research on these.

The company has tied with the University of Berlin to create a research and development centre focused on emerging technologies such as automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Recently, Infosys also announced a donation of $2 mn (around Rs 12 crore) to New Jersey-based post-doctoral research facility, Institute of Advanced Study (IAS). The fund will be used to support visiting scientists and scholars advance their research at the institute.

"Our relationship with universities has always been either towards building some kind of research collaboration in areas where we feel they have enough strength or even pubish joint papers. Of late, we are also trying to see whether there are any joint business opportunities," said senior source in Infosys.

The souce said in addition to exploring business opportunities and conducting joint research, partnerships with some of these global institutes also help in establishing a strong employment brand in those geographies.

"Another important element, which many people often also miss out, is we also need to attract the graduates of these universities. This is not that easy. When the research students work on our projects and get to know about us, they also become potential employees," the senior official said.

Apart from partnerships with universities at the corporate level, Infosys Foundation, the corporate social responsibility arm of the company is also funding research on newer technologies.

In September this year, the foundation instituted a corpus of Rs 30 crore for the Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI) to enable it invite distinguished mathematicians from across the world to mentor students and boost the institute's quality of research. In August this year, Infosys Foundation had extended a grant of Rs 20 crore to Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science (IISc) for setting up a Mathematics and Physics Infosys Chair Professorship.

"One of the things we are funding as a part of our CSR initiative is promoting education, especially in mathematics, which is so critical for the industry, especially in emerging areas like big data and analytics," the source added.