Dr. Apoorva Palkar, Director- Innovation & Incubation Linkage, Savitribai Phule Pune University emphasizes on the motto of setting up the start-up innovation cells

I would call this as new order of education because we all are tired of the concept of rote learning says Dr Apoorva Palkar, Director- Innovation & Incubation Linkage, Savitribai Phule Pune University in an interview with Chandan Anand, Founding Editor, ArdorComm Media Group at the ‘ArdorComm – Higher Education and Edtech Conclave & Awards 2022’ #HEETPune

What is the motto of setting up an Innovation & Incubation Linkage at SPPU under your leadership?

It has been a great pleasure in leading this initiative in a 73-year-old university and this is a start-up in a 73-year-old organization. Building everything from scratch, from zero and bringing it to a level where we now have about 340 colleges, where we have setup the start-up innovation cells. We are building a culture of innovation in the grassroot which is through the colleges and the students. Along with that we are also trying to spot innovators from the open market. We are also trying to reach out to people from the government to find out where are the problems and what is the kind of solution that the market today is looking at. So, this is kind of trying to build in the capacity for people to have originality of thinking, that’s the outline or underlined motto for us.

According to you how much should we rate to the innovation and skill development apart from the regular studies in the regularized curriculum of institutions?

I think what we are building here is a new order of education. I would call this as new order of education because we all are tired of the concept of rote learning. Everyone is talking about how can we get away from the rote learning, where everything is governed by marks and at the end of the day placements. This is what the innovation cell is trying to do and build up in the college ecosystem, how we make people think, how do we make faculties think and how do we get them away from a cut paste model. So that’s what we are trying to do through all our initiatives. We are happy to see and spot more than ten thousand ideas under the University of Pune and there are a lot of people who are coming forward to also reward them. Its just not about recognition of an idea but how do we commercialize this is also very important. On one side people say that you need to be creating job givers but how will the job givers be created unless you have an ecosystem that helps entrepreneurs to kind of build the companies. So, this is what we are trying to do in short.