Inventing and Patenting made easy for IIT students

By Apeksha Srivastava

INVENT@IITGN is the first of its kind 6-week annual summer program in India, in which selected students from IITs throughout the country gather at IIT Gandhinagar to ideate, build and test prototypes of their inventions.

Over the past few years, the Government of India has been launching various schemes and programs to foster innovations, facilitate investments, enhance skill-development, protect intellectual property and create numerous global opportunities in the fields of automobiles, aviation, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, construction, defense manufacturing, electrical machinery, food processing, textiles, leather, media, mining, railways, renewable energy, biotechnology, space, thermal power, electronics, etc. The aim is to encourage creative thinking and invent indigenous solutions for day-to-day technical problems and significant needs of society. In the process, the government expects to transform and strengthen India into a ‘maker’ that is preferred across the globe. This expertise can be attained only if we cultivate young minds at academic levels and provide them the right opportunities to develop new models, technologies and systems that can benefit the common man.

Being an institute of national importance and mentor of some of the brightest young minds, IIT Gandhinagar has always encouraged learning by doing approach among its students. The institute motivates students to be aware and responsible towards the society which they are a part of. Following this same approach, a unique program in innovation, INVENT@IITGN, was started last year in the summer of 2018. INVENT@IITGN is the first of its kind 6-week annual summer program in India, in which selected students from IITs throughout the country gather at IIT Gandhinagar to ideate, build and test prototypes of their inventions. These prototypes should address a real need, be feasible and practical in terms of considerations such as safety, size, weight and cost. The participating students present their ideas to different evaluators every week and utilize the comments and suggestions to further improve their inventions. Towards the end of the program, the students write and file provisional patent applications with the Indian and U.S. Patent and Trademark offices and participate in a competition where a panel of distinguished designers, inventors, engineers and patent attorneys choose the best inventions.

This program was founded in the year 2013 by Professor of Physics and U.S. Patent Attorney Alan Wolf and Professor of Mechanical Engineering Eric Lima of The Cooper Union, a renowned engineering institute in New York. Over the past 6 years, the original program in the U.S. has produced many outstanding inventions, some of which are also moving towards commercial development.

The program was also initiated as a summer program at Syracuse University, U.S. in 2017, where it drew the attention of four distinguished U.S. based alumni of IIT Bombay and they decided to fund and start the program at one of the IITs in India as a gesture to give back to the education system which they were part of in the early 1970s. They zeroed in on IITGN due to its unique and out-of-the-box approaches, which are not just limited to educating students but also inspire them to contribute towards the betterment of the society. Professors Wolf and Lima were thrilled with the idea of working with the students of IITs and this is how the program made its way to India at IIT Gandhinagar for the first time in 2018.

One of the four supporters behind bringing this program to India and an alumnus of IIT Bombay, Mr. Ruyintan Mehta expressed that nowadays the students are very confident, creative and quick learners. This program provides them a suitable platform to showcase their talents as well as promotes to take further the message of ‘Make in India’.

The program commences with a mandatory session on basic prototyping skills - 3D printing, laser cutting and using simple tools. Professors Wolf and Lima work directly with the students, alongside IITGN Professors Vineet Vashista and Nithin George.

Prof. Wolf shared that the experience of working with students on inventions is more rewarding than teaching academic subjects. The greatest benefit is that students profoundly develop their communication skills during the process. Each round of criticism results in a better invention or a better presentation. Despite all the competition, there is a wonderfully healthy and supportive environment among the students.

A budget of up to Rs. 50,000 is given to each team for raw materials. All participants who successfully complete the program receive a Rs. 10,000 stipend with a certificate of participation. They compete for a first prize of Rs. 2 lakhs and a second prize of Rs. 1 lakh for creating the ‘Best Invention’ and ‘Second Best Invention’. Inventions are the sole property of the student inventors. The provisional patent applications protect these inventions for one year from the date of filing the application.

According to Prof. Sudhir Jain, Director, IITGN, the main objective is to promote students towards being problem solvers for real-life challenges. It is heartening to see the very high-quality work on some very practical problems by students in just six weeks. Efforts are being made to expand this initiative with time.

In the year 2018, students from IIT Kharagpur, IIT Madras, IIT Guwahati, IIT Jammu and IIT Gandhinagar participated in this program and formed 10 teams with 2 students in each. They filed patents for all 10 inventions which covered a huge diversity of fields ranging from navigation system for visually impaired and compact foldable toilets to paper bag making machine and load carrier for laborers. Due to the great success and popularity of this initiative last year, the number of student intake has been increased up to 30 (15 teams) this year.

Students of Electronics and Electrical Communication from IIT Kharagpur who participated in INVENT@IITGN 2018, Yash Sharma and Haque Farazul, explained that the idea of being able to file a patent in such a short duration is extremely attractive. The students have the freedom to do everything needed to develop a useful invention. The team developed a solution to intra- and inter-row weeding for small-sized farms and won the first prize of Rs. 2 lakhs.

Another team comprising of Shubham Nandeshwar (IIT Madras) and Tanmay Gupta (IIT Gandhinagar) said that the program is very structured with hard deadlines to finish a product. No college or program in India teaches how to go from ideation to actual working prototype in such a small time-span. They developed a car under-run protection system that prevents a car from going under a heavy-duty vehicle through energy absorbing pivoting mechanism to reduce life loss in road accidents.

This year, the program has commenced from May 16^th, 2019 and will continue till June 28^th, 2019.

About the Author:

Apeksha Srivastava is Senior Project Associate, External Communications, IIT Gandhinagar. She did MTech (2016-18) in Biological Engineering from IIT Gandhinagar.