The writer is the vice-chancellor of the newly-established IT University in Lahore. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge.
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 27th, 2013.
COMMENTS (32)
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Due to elections ITU can not hire new faculty members .but soon after election you will see difference . And we know what most of so called "highly educated" faculty members in pakistani universities are doing .Atleast that isn't going to a case in ITU.
@AQ - Who gave ITU a status of university when 40 students study and have no PhD faculty
ITU has 1 phd at this time.... Because ITU has 40 students till now. it will be useless to hire phd at ITU at this time.
@MSS Most respectfully, I am right and you are wrong :). A PhD is exactly what you have said, a sticker that a person has a brain and is not afraid to use it. This is not to demean the effort that goes in getting one. But this also does not mean that someone without this sticker cannot achieve the standards of someone with this sticker. Academia is full of people who did their PhDs in one subject and then turned around and did their postdoc and subsequent research in another totally different subject. So, will you disregard their postdoc research because they dont have a PhD in that subject. The world is also littered with people who have PhDs and when you talk to them you struggle to find a neuron or an iota of intelligence. Most ground breaking research in university labs is being conducted by research assistants who do not have PhDs and many of them are not even enrolled in PhDs, they are there just as employees with no desire for a PhD. With regards to setting up a university, you dont get your faculty on day of the announcement. You build it as time progresses. Even the ivy leagues and red bricks of US and UK did not get to their levels even within the first decade of their establishment. We should wish Dr Said goodluck in his endeavour and if it is a well intentioned exercise, he will be able to attract and lead a good faculty and motivated students. Finally, my advice is not to disregard the Joes and Janes Public of this world. You will be surprised what you walk past in your ignorance.
@TraxRider You are right and you are not. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were individuals with original ideas motivated by innovation and money. They changed the way the world works. Individuals can have excellent ideas. The history is full of such names, Thomas Edison, the inventor for one. Personal flair for innovation is not the same as having knowledge of the subject. At a very crude basic level (I mean no disrespect in any sense) an iron smith may be able to make very good articles out of iron and those may sell well but he may know next to nothing about other metals or temperature control or process control etc. Those aspects are essential for students who need to look beyond the basic foundry work. Here, we are talking about setting up a university. One cannot teach students unless one has a higher level qualification otherwise the students might be teaching the staff.
Yes a lot of mathematical research is needed to solve a problem as indeed in many other fields, for example battery technology in a computer design scenario, and you are right about the time lag between the research and its implementation but if there is no research there can hardly be any implementation. Even for reverse engineering (Chinese excel in it) you need world class technologists. PH D is simply a sticker suggesting the chap has got a level head with a brain inside, but a necessary sticker. Grids and parallel processing have been around for a while now. But Joe public cannot do those things unless one has the knowledge about the computer architechure, gateways, heat control systems and so on. Will this ITU be imparting this kind of knowledge and provide opportunities for students to design such systems? That is the question the planners must keep in mind. It is a good thing that such a venture is in the offing, nobody is against it, people are just curious and being cautious.
A very interesting piece and an even more interesting debate. Goodluck to you Dr Saif on your noble quest. I read above comments criticising the effort by questioning the number of PhDs he has in his institute. This reminds me a scene from Kingdom of Heavan where the priest questions Orlando Bloom on how can he defend Jerusalem, saying "We have no knights". Similarly, critics above are questioning how can Dr Saif's institution perform research when "he has no PhDs".
What is a PhD? It is a qualification that is obtained by performing original research in a field of study. How can someone without a PhD do research in the first place to get a PhD eventually? How many PhDs did Steve Jobs have to have delivered such epic innovation to mankind?
Then there is a question about "state of the art equipment", "supercomputers" and the like. I guess critics falling into this category have fallen far off the technology trail and know of neither the history of technology nor its present let alone where it is heading. You guys heard of something called Grids? These are collections of distributed computers on which you can lease computing power and memory to get your processing intensive tasks executed. Collectively they can deliver performance of the order of supercomputers.
Finally, research is a lot about problem solving and very little about implementation. Many many man years of maths and algorithms went into image processing before the first digital camera was sold. This does not mean implementation is not important, it is just a final and an important part of the entire innovation chain. There are aspects of technology in which you can do innovative research even without a desk calculator.
Most of all, you need motivation and inspiration to do innovation.
Very competent staff, visionary leadership, supported by matching state of the art equipment and a strictly merit driven admissions policy only can hope to make an IIT type university in Pakistan. If the leadership cannot resist external pressures the project will be stalled easily. Will the university be challenged to design any new computer types? Supercomputers? Or is it going to be just another training institute?
Mr. Getting admission in IIT is harder then MIT (Only for Graduate courses, not about PG)
Gulam Rasool "Kuldeep Sharma" New Delhi
Good point, all research papers for filling the stomach of the requirements, is the real problems of all Pakistani PhDs. We have to move forward from it and have to translate research into something productive for local people with local problems
all it count is the step taken, we are already far behind the advanced countries so for us any good step is a giant leap. all the best with IIT.
The author presents analogies which are nonsensical - since over the years tens if not hundreds of thousands of students may have graduated from MIT/Stanford, he cannot just count them in as revenues created by those universities for something that may have happen years later by a small number of those students. By that logic, You can say that the san francisco public schools created so and so of GDP or Students who were attending Reid college in 1973 (few dozen students) have add over half trillion to the world economy every year (as steve jobs was attending that year). Coming now to my second point, you need to focus more on creating strong schools as adults people will be able to find their own strengths.
You talk about research, innovation, MIT and so on but please tell me how many PhD faculty does UIT have? NONE
ITU looks nothing more than an internet cafe. A university is built on its able research oriented faculty which ITU is lacking at all
Great initiative. Let's hope that it stays away from political influence. Also, that it provides right blend of technical and managerial expertise to the students. Best of Luck.
I thought ITU stands for International Telecommunication Union.
I have been a student of Dr. Umar Saif at LUMS, who is one of the star faculty members of SSE LUMS. In fact he was the spirit of MIT at SSE LUMS. His passion and brilliance at LUMS is famed -- I think he has won more awards than we can count working from a Pakistani university. I wish him all the success for this new ambitious project.
Finally Pakistan is starting a clean-slate technology university in the public-sector with the right intent and planning. I agree that such a university would need to include sciences, humanities and a strong business school -- no engineering school can have impact without these essential ingredients. At the same time, this is a laudable effort -- wishing you the same success we had with IITs in India ... and don't bother trying to rescue mediocre universities with decades of inertia, this hasn't happened worked anywhere in the world. Starting out with new clean-slate institutions is the way to go. Wishing you success ...
We must not forget that MIT is living in the US where the whole system is progress driven. Pakistani universities, while living in Pakistan face a bottleneck when interfacing with the Govt. Projects are converted to products when there is a running production infrastructure is in place and people are working together for a common mission.
Unfortunately, even in top Pakistani universities, the research culture remains in an incubation and output is measured against numbers not quality. We all know, only quality research will lead to quality solutions to out problems.
If you only try to improve the universities, nothing will change. The change needs to begin by providing the local industry with resources such as energy and capital. With a lack of these resources, research will remain in IEEE/OSA/SPIE servers and will never translate to products that solve local problems.
On the lighter side, we not only need solutions to our problems in the form of products, we also need the mindset to take care of out things, belongings etc.
You bring MIT to Pakistan and it will fail. It is not about the MITs, it is about the national character and culture,
There are many UETs in Pakistan (+Dhaka) that established after the independence (like Indian IIT). It would be better to improve UETs rather than establishing new technology universities.
"Unfortunately, research and development in universities in Pakistan has rarely translated in improving the high-tech economy of Pakistan."
i thought they helped you create a mass-sms delivering tool that made you one of the top tech innovators under-35.
Author is only half right about academic excellence being a driver of growth. But, that is not the full story. Majority of IIT graduates left India (and continue to do so). Only a few have stayed back to start businesses. Most IT companies in India were created by non-IIT graduates.
The primary driver of IT growth in India is the focus & attention given by many state govts. to creating English speaking man power pool, promoting business parks and giving all support to businessmen - hoping to create large scale employment.
Pakistan has pretty much the same advantages that India had about two decades back, but is disadvantaged by the unsettling situation and wrong priorities.
It is not possible to have a intellectually challenging business like IT, in a country or cities, that are challenged by strife, terror & especially wrong priorities. Pakistan's priority has been 'religion', instead of growth. More madrasa education is imparted than technical & english education (which is essential to compete in the world).
In 1980s, Pakistan had a proportionally well developed IT sector compared to India. It fell by wayside, because India continued to focus on growth and Pakistan focused on 'Islamiyat', Kashmir & Afghanistan!!
I am some what baffled by the narrow scope of the education - implied by the name of the university, Information Technology University - that would be imparted in this institution. It would be better to create Universities which are more broad in terms of the disciplines that would be taught there. MIT is an institute of technology and covers a whole range of scientific and technical disciplines, instead of narrowly focusing on some specific technology. Additionally it has a many departments which would fall in the domain of humanities. In fact the whole institute is organized in six schools only one of which is the School of Engineering . The remaining schools are:
School of Architecture and Planning School of Engineering School of Science School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Sloan School of Management Whitaker College of Health Sciences and Technology
MIT's economics, linguistics, management, philosophy, architecture departments are very strong and are considered to be among the best in the world. In the world of today technologies are interdependent and this trend is increasing rapidly and we should keep this in view while embarking on building universities and colleges.
I think if we focus on teenagers(school and inter college education system) to mold their minds towards innovation or research then it will better impact on our society. A guy in US no older than 17 developed first hack(Jailbreak n unlock) of iPhone with no background at all in development or computer sciences. ITU is no doubt a good step but for countries like Pakistan primary education system should be corrected and enhanced.
Best of luck to Dr.Saif. You have the support of the whole nation.
We already have a local MIT in SSE of LUMS. Please read the recent news at http://lums.edu.pk/news.php and see for yourself. Just quoting a news article, Number of students of Computer Science (this is their first batch) have landed internships in Microsoft in US. Cheers!
While encouraging and cultivating innovation is a good thing, I don't think that is the only way to create business and jobs as the author seems to imply. China borrowed (and on many occasions stole) technology from the west and encouraged them to invest in China, thus creating companies and jobs. This did not involve a lot of innovation. Even in India, the IT companies just built their businesses on technology already developed elsewhere and thus did not involve any new technical innovations.
Just some food for thought.
good piece. but at the moment ITU's faculty consists of friends of dr. saif. that faculty does not have any experience in research or teaching. it would be nice if he follows merit at his this institution and lets go his habit of awarding his buddies for a while.
Very good initiative. However, the program to succeed the institute should also line up "innovation fund" from investors (public and private) and banks and a good team of venture capitalalists. This is as important as education. If the investment team can "see" the future of technology, then it is better. Some of the technologies are beyond the comprehension of nominal investors. All biotech and technology investment funds in the US are chaired by PhD with business background /knowledge.
Transforming innovation into commercial enterprise takes about 7-10 years, and hence investor pool should be knowledgable, creative, and aggressive. In every US university, there is a technology transfer office today, which works with business school and business community and has access to innovation fund as a seed capital.
Seed fund - incubator-technology commercial nourishment-additional capital- market transfer of capital-professional managers-a good team work.
An elimination of single step in an existing sugar refineries, for example, can save millions each year. In this case, the sugar refinery that puts up initial funding gets first bite at the apple during commercialization or gets a share of the future profit if the refinery is not interested at this stage.
Dear Dr. Saif, you will certainly agree that the "MIT of Pakistan" is already being built - at LUMS, its called the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering :-)
Wishing you and IIT the very best. The more MITs and the more LUMS that Pakistan gets the better.
Wonderful! Hope Dr. Saif can build the MIT of Pakistan. If anyone can, he can!
Higher education cannot undo poor primary and secondary education. While the most able and talented will succeed, that is not good enough. While your point is well taken, if only half of the importance/enthusiasm for new universities was seen for education in schools, things for all us would change for the better.
Namal university in Mianwali is best example for us.