The Central Ministry of Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSME), and MSME Development and Facilitation Office conducted a vendor development programme in which experts called for greater collaboration between industry and academia.
The event was conducted at Vidyavardhaka College of Engineering in collaboration with the District Industries Centre (DIC) on Thursday and management experts also stressed the imperatives of evolving a customer-centric business model for growth.
The objective of the vendor development programme and exihbition was to create a platform for MSME units to find customers in a move which will be mutually beneficial for both the manufacturers and the customers who are part of the supply chain link.
D.Sadashive Gowda, principal, VVCE, called for greater collaboration between the industry and the academia if the latter was to produce high-quality industry-ready engineers. He said this calls for collaboration and he suggested that the MSMEs share technical issues plaguing their production with the college which in turn would put a team of students to work on resolving it.
“Such an approach will not only ensure quality in production but will help in the industrial growth. At present the situation is such that people at the helm of affairs in different industries are bogged down with administrative and managerial issues while creativity is lacking. But if it were shared with our student community a low-cost and viable solution could be found and will help both the industry and the academia,” he added.
He said the concept of industries collaborating with academia was universal in the U.S., and other advanced economies but not so in India. “While there is a general complaint from the industry that the freshers from the engineering colleges lack industrial skills, the industry should also ask as to what it has done to help academia produce good engineers,” said Prof. Gowda.
Dr. N. Muthukumar, president and COO, India, Cummins-Meritor, stressed the imperatives of evolving a business model that was customer-centric. He said if MSMEs adopt such a model they are bound to grow as their customers will not desert them.
He said the MSMEs should also strive to focus on export and atleast 50 per cent of their turnover should be from export business. This will not only help the MSMEs to benchmark against the best in the world but will also expose them to a broader market with different cultures.
Dr. Muthukumar said there was a general perception that Mysuru was tourism-centric but there was a steady growth in industries with many centres of excellence and unlike Bengaluru, Mysuru has maintained a balance between industrial growth and quality of living. Referring to the projected growth of India and its emergence as a developed nation by 2047, Mr. Muthukumar said the MSMEs had a tremendous opportunity to capitalise on the growth story.
T. Dinesh, Joint Director, DIC, Mysuru, K.B. Lingaraju, president, MCCI, Sudhakar S. Shetty, past president, FKCCI, and others were present.
