When I arrived at MIT, in 2002, after completing my PhD at University of Cambridge, I was a little underwhelmed by the campus of MIT. Compared with the University of Cambridge, which had a campus that sprawled an entire city, MIT seemed like a collection of plain-looking buildings, with several key departments in rented space.

What made MIT special was not as much its campus or facilities, but its focus on solving real-world problems and the entrepreneurial streak it inculcates in its students. MIT alumni have started 25,800 companies. These companies employ more than three million people and generate annual revenues of over $1.9 trillion. If MIT was a country, it would have the eleventh highest GDP of any nation in the world.

It is not just MIT that has had this kind of impact. If we combine the companies founded by Stanford University and MIT alumni, these companies annually add $4.7 trillion to the world economy. They have generated 8.4 million jobs since 1930. If we treat Stanford and MIT as a single country, it will be the world’s fourth richest country in the world with a GDP higher than Germany’s!

This is the impact technology universities can have on the fortune of a country. Not too far from home, this was recognised by Jawaharlal Nehru many decades ago, which led to the creation of the now-famed Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT).

Graduates of IIT have led the information technology (IT) revolution in India and hold many key positions worldwide, bringing both business and enterprise home. India has some of the biggest IT companies in the world, including Tata Consulting Services, which has annual revenues of over $10 billion. As a point of comparison, Pakistan’s entire annual software export is less than two billion dollars.

Unfortunately, research and development in universities in Pakistan has rarely translated in improving the high-tech economy of Pakistan. For many decades, universities in Pakistan lacked funding and focus on research. While the advent of the Higher Education Commission has led to an increased focus on research, this research has rarely translated into improving the competitiveness of our technology industry. Especially in engineering and technology, research papers must translate into intellectual property, innovative products and services. In a field like IT, it often does not take much beyond the proverbial two-students-in-a-garage to start a billion dollar company. Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, Google, HP, Facebook were all started like that.

However, instilling an entrepreneurial streak in our next generation of innovators and academicians will require planning and investment. As an example, the British government invested $65 million to establish the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) in 2000. The programme was aimed at replicating in Cambridge the entrepreneurial ecosystem of the top US universities.

It is with this spirit that we are starting the Information Technology University (ITU) in Lahore. Starting with a graduate programme in Computer Science, the curriculum of ITU is designed to encourage students to work on real-world and locally relevant problems. Students will work in cross-disciplinary research labs, with the aim of building solutions that have real impact beyond research papers. In the entrepreneurship course, students are expected to develop an early version of a working product, alongside a business plan. In a course called development lab, students work with local communities to devise technology solutions for people living at the bottom of the pyramid. The corresponding research lab at ITU is focused on addressing the fundamental disconnect between technology designed for the developed world and the physical, economic and social realities of a country like Pakistan. Going simply by sheer market size, billions of dollars are waiting to be made with the appropriate entrepreneurial ecosystem.

As we take the first steps towards building the MIT of Pakistan, we hope that it will play its part in reviving our economy, creating jobs and enhancing the competitiveness of our IT industry.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 27^th, 2013.

Burhan and his team at the Punjab Information Technology Board built a smart-phone based monitoring system that lets the government track its dengue prevention efforts in real-time using location based pictures.

Sidra and Muhammed founded an internet e-commerce service last year and started selling handmade leather shoes to the world from a warehouse in Okara (they now employ 11 people); Qari Khalil from Rawalpindi uses Skype to teach Quran to students in the US and Farasat Iqbal, another Punjab government employee, makes clever use of Internet enabled phones to work out when rural health clinics need more medicines.

What do these people have in common? They’re overcoming the odds; making creative use of technology to grow the economy and make a positive impact on society. They’re our innovation heroes. They work through electricity shortages, infrastructure deficits, and regulatory barriers.

Next week we’ll launch an Innovation Punjab campaign, with the support of Google Inc, to put innovation and technology on top of our agenda. The aim of the campaign is to shape Punjab government policies across key governance issues.

It’s a clarion call to Pakistanis at home and abroad to help us enable thousands more heroes across Pakistan make use of technology to boost our economy, drive social innovation and improve society.

Working across sectors with government colleagues, entrepreneurs, industry and civil society, we can harness our tech-savvy youth to drive the development of an information technology ecosystem that is optimised for creativity and originality.

The campaign, to be launched on August 16 in Lahore, focuses on how the government can automate business processes, facilitate access to fast and cheap internet and e-payment mechanisms to open new avenues for entrepreneurs, seek feedback from citizens to improve service delivery and identify corruption, open a data platform to bring transparency to the government; work with industries and universities to cultivate the high-tech industry and create real-time access to the latest market prices to improve the livelihood of farmers.

We’re doing this because it shouldn’t be too hard. We want to lower the barriers to entry to enable all citizens of Punjab to benefit from technology.

Today, there are too many barriers. One barrier is cheap, widespread and fast access to the internet; another is the lack of an easy-to-use online payment system.

A good start to improve the regulatory framework for innovation is simply to highlight the barriers that are discouraging innovation and bring them to the top of the policy agenda.

Our vision for Punjab is for there to be many more people like Mohammed and Sidra, who are not only selling handmade shoes around the world, but also driving our economy and promoting Pakistan.

Dr Umar Saif is associate professor of computer science at LUMS and is currently working as the chairman of the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB).

Published in The Express Tribune, August 12^th, 2012. 

In late 1990s, the University of California, Berkley was working on a pioneering wireless networking project that had a deceptively simple tagline: ‘Access is the killer application’. This simple tagline has stuck with me for over a decade. Whether it was my research and entrepreneurial life at MIT and LUMS for the past 10 years, or my recent role in public-sector IT initiatives, enabling access has been a pivotal theme of my work.

One of the most successful projects in my research group at LUMS is a BitTorrent client, called BitMate, which enables computers with a slow network connection to pool their bandwidth for downloading content faster. When we first built the BitMate system, I remember a journalist asking me about the usefulness of our system. My reply was simple: give people a way to access information, and they will surprise you with what they can do with it. BitMate is now used by over 35,000 users from 184 countries to download content like e-books and computer software. Shortly after we released the system for public use, I received an email from a student in Iran thanking me for making the software.

In my recent role at the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB), I have found that the basic building block of e-governance initiatives is invariably access to information: access to data about the level of crime reported at different police stations, for better decision-making; access to patterns in which a disease like dengue may be spreading in the city, for better preventive measures; access to information about the level of service rendered by government hospitals, for better allocation of resources; access to information about one’s ownership of a land asset, to avoid fraudulent property transactions.

In the same vein, I hope that laptops awarded to the students in Punjab will facilitate better access to educational content and tools. Indeed, similar programmes worldwide, such as the MIT One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative and the Intel Classmate PC have had a huge impact. The MIT OLPC scheme, backed both by the World Economic Forum and the UNDP has resulted in over 2.5 million laptops being distributed to students in various countries.

Much like the philosophy of educational projects such as MIT OLPC, the Punjab government’s 125,000 laptops use a free, open-source Ubuntu operating system. Supporting open-source software at this scale, in a country with rampant use of proprietary and pirated software, is bold and laudable. Due to its flexibility, zero-cost and broad-based academic support, open-source software is the de facto standard for college and university students worldwide. This is the first time an initiative in Pakistan has promoted open-source software in a project of this scale. With an open-source operating system installed in the laptops, students can benefit from a wide range of free, open-source applications, instead of having to buy expensive proprietary applications or using illegal pirated versions.

With 125,000 brilliant students equipped with laptops, there is great opportunity for the government, IT industry and universities to develop an ecosystem that affords ubiquitous network accessibility, localised educational content and applications to make best use of these laptops in our higher education system.

I remember when my father gifted me my first computer on doing well in O-levels. This introduced me to the wonderful world of computers and eventually led me to become a computer science professor. Seventeen years later, I still have that computer displayed as a trophy in my study room. I hope the students who have received the laptops cherish this award the same way I did many years ago and go on to contribute positively towards our education system.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 8^th, 2012.