Academic institutions the world over are transforming into organizations with greater commitment to innovating for the social and economic benefits of their stakeholders. IIT Bombay has been increasingly focused on delivering research results for the greater society. Today, with the country on an economic upswing and substantial demographic expansion, expectations are on the rise. There can not be a better time to rise up to the task of externalizing its innovations.

As a country, our people are increasingly appreciating the results of home grown research and are sensitized to the need for nurturing an indigenous research culture. As a result, faculty are able to see the tangible benefits of their research, beyond their publications, derived by utilizing various avenues that exist today for maturing their lab-scale explorations into full-fledged technologies. Students see the valueaddition from participating in and contributing to faculty research. While IIT Bombay has begun to capitalize on these positive developments, several challenges remain.

Today's problems demand a multi-disciplinary problem- solving approach, especially in areas such as education, healthcare, energy and environmental conservation. Developing solutions for such problems will demand that faculty from erstwhile independent areas, each with its own terminology, research methodology and culture come together, to exploit each other's inherent strengths and research facilities, and collaboratively tackle issues.

For Indian academics, who have historically been relatively more closeted in their own technical areas than their counterparts in the developed world, this would mean a conscious departure from the past. Self-assessment and introspection, along with external pressures as well as incentives are called for. IITB has already put in place processes for the formation of cross disciplinary research groups and for the identification of thrust areas. The highly visible work of the nano-electronics group, involving more than forty faculty/scientists from almost half the departments at IITB, is a laudable example of this endeavour.

For a research institution to flourish, a large multiplying effect must be associated with our researcher efforts. To be fruitful in these efforts we need to ensure that our support systems are at par with our needs. Foremost, this requires that we sensitize funding agencies, especially private ones, to finance beyond the usual, expect more than the obvious, and be willing to entertain risky propositions. Secondly, we need to ensure availability of well-maintained research infrastructure. We need to work in a direction to establish administrative policies and processes that offer reasonable career incentives to well-qualified technical support personnel. As part of this we plan to put in place a number of processes that will help, (a) to intensify fundamental research programs and (b) to identify multi-disciplinary team-based R&D programs with well-defined targets and deliverables.

This issue of Update is appearing after a hiatus. We will now be going back to a semi-annual publication mode to help timely dissemination of IITB's R&D results. As always, we look forward to your feedback.