The world bank’s innovation Paradox 2019 report asserts that nations that do not realize a good return on investment in science and technology when they had too narrow a focus on R&D spent and number of PhDs produced. The report cites that in order to be successful, nations need to invest in “complementaries” such as virtual training, industry-academia linkages, incubators, VC funds, training of companies to assess and incorporate tech, patent rights, and movement of personnel between research, academia and private sector.

The fact that progressive nations always invest in research, science, and art whether it’s the House of Wisdom of Harun Al-Rashid in Baghdad, the Library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt or DARPA’s investment into Silicon Valley. Time and over, we see that investment in knowledge accumulation is a crucial part of civilizational success.

Unfortunately, in Pakistan, we have not seen sustained investments in R&D, and the gaps between what our industry wants in this hyper crazy modern-day world versus what we produce in our academia are growing starker day by day.

So much so that experts now question the efficacy of the research organizations operating in Pakistan. The general claims that Pakistan has excellent research sounds hollow when we analyze that not a single solution or a product has come out from Pakistan in the first place. A case in point is the number of international firms that get their R&D done from Pakistan as compared to India and China? The only criteria where these white elephants could be defended is the job creation parameter. However, if in the dire situation of public financing is to be considered, then there should be no sacred cows, and research organizations producing little value for money should meet the same fate.

Nonetheless, disbanding public infrastructure for science and technology would amount to making the most insensible idea in the 21st century. Instead, reforming the research organizations is the way to go with freeing them from the control of governmental bureaucracy. The Ministry of Science and Technology, for instance, operates under dire circumstances already, starved of all oxygen, with no clear mandate and very little money. It’s not entirely their fault when they don’t deliver. It’s the policymakers and politicians, including those who want to create new structures instead of reforming them and making them work for the larger public interest.

The real fault, one can argue, lies with the bureaucracy and the policymakers who have never asked for any output. Never a funded project is defined with a demarcated goal and production. If not, why was the project approved in the first place? If there was a clear mandate for delivery, why wasn’t the organization held accountable for it? The failing is with the approval and monitoring system first and the delivery organization later.
The Government has no clue of how to evaluate science, and neither, frankly, scientists have any clue of how to deliver on economic return.

If Pakistan needs to provide sustained employment opportunities to its graduates, then reforming the research and investing in science and technology is a must. Graduate students should be provided better academia-industry linkages, free flow of ideas must be appreciated, and linkages must be grown. This is exactly the reason why Consuldents has taken up a private sector-led initiative to foster superior linkages, providing students to work on R&D projects, such as prototyping, business engineering, etc. while providing students an opportunity to upload their Final Year Projects (FYP) and getting them revalidated by industry professionals. The FYPs in true essence is the reflection of grass-roots innovation and Consuldents will continue to showcase student FYPs to industry mentors for creating innovation-led products in the future.

In the end, when embarking upon the reforms of the R&D system for industrial competitiveness, the scope of reform should not be limited to the organizational development of key research organizations; rather it should also be an evaluation of the role of the approving councils as an oversight governance model going all the way to the Policies of the relevant ministries responsible for the R&D along with the macro policies for the entire system of trade and production in Pakistan.