Innovation Centre Launched by IIT Kharagur

Undergraduate students are now given a chance to start innovating from the very first year as IIT Kharagpur has launched an innovation centre. The centre has been named MN Faruqui Innovations Centre, this name is given after its alumnus and former faculty. It was launched on Saturday with seed-funding by another alumnus Arjun Malhotra, the co-founder of HCL technologies.

The centre would promote the culture of innovation among a wide cross section of students and faculty with support from its alumni and the industry, BSE 0.28 %, officials said.

Keeping in mind that today's innovations is not related to any specific domain or discipline, the centre will encourage and encompass multi-disciplinary interactions between students and faculty at all levels of education, undergraduate, postgraduate and research.

The Innovations Centre comprises a Design Facility and Tinkering Laboratory.

The Design Facility of the Innovations Centre supports the new ideas and innovations. One can organise meeting, brainstorming and conferencing centre with Computing and Information Technology aiding its activities for all those involved to generate new product concepts and ideas, the Tinkering Lab provides a venue to make and experiment with various components to realise these into novel products or systems.

The Tinkering Laboratory has collaborative conferencing tools, 3D printers, a mechanical workshop with fabrication machinery, electronics workbenches, PCB fabrication set-ups, and prototyping tools for embedded systems among others.

Faculty may also involve students from different streams to help them realize novel ideas being generated in this process, they said.