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November 1, 2013 Contents:
From the desk of Editor What is life?
Editorial 1 R&D News 2 Why small details matter for big firms 2 Webcam Vision Technology 3 Surveys show four decades of stable corporate support for academic R&D 3 Training & development 4 13 Amazing entrepreneurs of Pakistan in 2013 5 Microsoft BCG Research reveals IT helps fuel revenue and job growth among Indian SME's 6 NEWS in Pictures 7
Editorial Team Chief Editor Zahid Iftikhar Managing Editor Rozeen Shaukat Associate Editor Mujahid Ali
Life is nothing but finding the people who are crazy your way. People who can think out of box and who can dare think differently from other people. People who do not want to conform to the set traditions of society. People who don’t follow the beaten path but they go their own way and leave a trail behind. They don’t want just want to live but they want to live well. They want to do something for themselves and for other people. They try to reach their maximum potential despite adverse circumstances and also think of the well-being of the poor, the sick and the deprive. They take their personal responsibility and understand the elemental fact of life that they can change themselves. They take full charge of their own personality and work on it day in and day out. Sooner or later, they emerge victorious and become a stunning example of success for those who sit idly and wait for circumstances to change. Like all human beings, the choice is in our hands. Whether we wait for the things to happen or move forward to make them happen. So throw off the bow lines. Sail away from safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, dream, discover, and you will see that the whole world will be yours. Zahid Iftikhar
www.irp.edu.pk mujahid@irp.edu.pk Phone: +92 42 3584 6988
"Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity" — Competitive strategy expert Michael Porter
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R&D News Chief Coordinator Mr. Rahmat Ullah is visiting across the country tour of universities & industries for grand Innovation Summit 2014.This would be a mega event regarding University R&D. A large no of Industry Executives will participate in the Summit. First ever satellite of any Pakistani University is all set to be launched on Nov 21, 2013 from Russia Lahore College for Women University (LCWU) organized lecture regarding Linking Research with Industry October 25th 210.Director of Institute of Research Science(IRS), Dr Shafiq Ur Rehman and Chief Coordinator Rahmat Ullah gave presenation.It is notable that women are also playing a pivotal role in the Science and Technology related activities in Pakistan . Mr. Naveed Ashraf, R&D Manager, Reso Chem was also present at this occasion. A memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed between Institute of Research Promotion & LCWU to conduct training workshop for faculty & students in order to foster the university innovation by linking to industry. The Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law offers a limited number of research scholarships. NUST Scientists will be IRP guests on Nov. 1-2, 2013. are looking for some progressive business executives to be invited in joint meeting. It will be a informal meeting session to share views of both stake holders. IRP is looking for research students /faculty for development of local waxes for fruits and vegetables.
Why small details matter for big firms By Katie HopeBusiness reporter, BBC News IHG executive Jan Smits learned about the details that go into the turndown service.Jan Smits is standing in his hotel room staring at his
watch and he's not very happy. But Mr Smits is no ordinary guest. He's the Asia, Middle East and Africa chief executive of Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG), the world's largest hotel chain. On a trip to India to see how young graduates are trained within the company he has just realised that the time taken to prepare the hotel rooms for bedtime - the so-called turndown service - is not standardised. At the Crowne Plaza New Delhi Rohini the process of turning down the duvet cover and closing the curtains took five minutes, but it should only take two minutes.It seems surprising that someone so senior, a member of the firm's executive committee, is concerned about this kind of small detail which one would assume would fall squarely under the remit of housekeeping.But for IHG, like all businesses, time equals money. If a regular process such as this takes longer than it should, then repeated 678,000 times for each of its rooms worldwide, the extra time spent would be significant and ultimately costly.
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But it's not only crucial for financial reasons, but so that a guest, whether they are staying at a Crowne Plaza in India or America, has the same experience each time. Mr Smits says IHG uses so-called "standard operating procedures" to ensure this level of standardisation. These outline every single step involved in any regular process, such as a
turndown or checking a guest into the hotel, to ensure it is both efficient and consistently creates the same end result. "From my experience here tonight there's just a little bit more room to make sure it's exactly the same across all the Crowne Plazas. We're very close but it can't be very close. it needs to be the same each time to create a great brand," he says.
Research & Innovation
Webcam Vision-A Wonderful Technology
A wonderful technology which neuroscientists claim is only 5 years away is ―webcam vision‖—a technology which is based on artificial stimulation of the visual cortex in visually impaired patients. For some time now it has been known that blind people are able to ―see‖ just with their brains, and a prosthetic device which could detect the external environment and generate basic images in the brain is only half a decade away. Currently, a team of scientists at the University of Texas are generating a detailed map of the visual cortex, and are hoping to begin working on a visual prosthetic device in the near future
Source :http://bio-associate.blogspot.com/2013/06/top-neurotechnology-breakthroughs-of.html
Funding: Surveys show four decades of stable corporate support for academic R&D By Susan R. Morrissey
Companies provided nearly 5% of the $65 billion spent on R&D activities by academia in academic fiscal 2011, according to data released by the National Science Foundation. This share of funding for academic R&D has been stable since the late 1970s.Of the 912 academic institutions covered by the Higher Education Research & Development Survey, two-thirds reported receiving some R&D money from the business sector. Nearly 40% said this support exceeded $1 million. Businesses made little distinction between public and private institutions: The share of business-funded academic R&D at public institutions was 4.7%, and at private ones it was 5.2%.
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Nearly 57,000 companies were estimated to have R&D activity in 2010, but only 18% of them funded academic efforts, according to another study, NSF’s 2010 Business R&D & Innovation Survey. The money directed by this group to academia represents less than 1% of their total company R&D spending, the survey finds. Further, for companies with long-term R&D spending of at least $7 million annually, 29% said they made payments or initiated new R&D collaborations with academia in 2010.
INDUSTRY DOLLARS Biotech companies top the list of backers of academic R&D, with a majority of industry money going toward medical sciences and engineering.NOTE: Industry percentages for academic fiscal 2011 represent the period July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011. Bar chart data are representative of an estimated 57,000 R&D-active companies. SOURCE: NSF’s Higher Education Research & Development Survey. http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i39/Businesss-Share-Academic-RD.html
Training & development
Upcoming Events PLA Conference 2013
by Pakistan Library Association Submission of Abstract: 27 October,2013 Submission of full paper 30 November,2013 Contact: conference2013@yahoo.com, conferencepla2013@gmail.com
International Conference on Modeling and Simulation 25-27 November,2013 Venue : Air University dmae_info@mail.au.edu.pk Phone +92 51 926 2557 Fax +92 51 926 0158 http://portals.au.edu.pk/icom
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Business & Industry 13 AMAZING ENTREPRENEURS AND INSPIRATIONAL PERSONALITIES FROM PAKISTAN IN 2013 Huh! Difficult to state but still based on the past and current life of these amazing people, we have listed down these as the most inspirational entrepreneurs from Pakistan for the year 2013. Check these out and don’t forget to follow them, it will definitely give you every day inspiration! Featured
and
recognized as a true leader in the IT
domain
many, and
by
the
one
only
Mr.
Salim who
Ghauri is
the
Chairman & CEO of NetSol Technologies; the largest IT company of Pakistan listed at NASDAQ Umar Saif, MIT Post Doc, is working with for the past 15 years. He is one of the best known his true entrepreneurship vision from last few
years. He has founded several start ups that
figures from the Pakistani IT industry.
are doing great in their own way. Difficult to sum up his achievements – he is also the founder of one of the first startup incubators in Lahore, Pakistan, called SCI.
Mentioned by Mashable, MariaUmar holds an M.A. in Literature and she is the Founder of Women’s Digital League. She is an inspiration for all the women out there who want to do out of the box stuff!
To be contd…
Source with thanks: Published by The BlogoGist on October 8, 2013 To be continued…
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Microsoft BCG Research reveals IT helps fuel revenue and job growth among Indian SME's By Gulveen Aulakh, ET Bureau The BCG report - Ahead of the Curve: Lessons on Technology and Growth from Small Business Leaders - found if more SMEs in India adopted the latest IT tools there is potential for SME revenue to grow by $56 billion and create 1.1 million new jobs.ET SPECIAL: Save precious time tracking your investments NEW DELHI: Tech-savvy small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) created more newjobs and drove more revenue gains over the past three years than SMEs using little technology, according to researchcommissioned by Microsoft Corp. and independently conducted by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a global management consulting firm.The BCG report - Ahead of the Curve: Lessons on Technology and Growth fromSmall Business Leaders - found if more SMEs in India adopted the latest IT tools there is potential for SME revenue to grow by $56billion and create 1.1 million new jobs. Karan Bajwa, Managing Director of Microsoft India said that there was a tremendous opportunity for economic growth. "Our objective is to help more SMEs transition to, and benefit from, modern IT. For customers, it means providing product training and helping SMEs understand the full range of available devices and services, but it also means community and industry investments such as skills training," he added.BCG's research found that over the past three years, IT-enabled SMEs grew revenues 15 per cent faster and created twice as many jobs as SMEs that use less technology. The research also revealed that across nearly all product categories, these fast-growing SMEs use more Microsoft solutions than any other products, and that SMEs view Microsoft as the top partner for new and future technology needs. In fact, when asked what technologies survey respondents could not live without, they choseMicrosoft Office as the top productivity application over all others. Moreover, SMEs that adopted Microsoft Cloud services grew faster than SMEs that do not use any Microsoft products. These companies also reported greatly improved employee mobility, scalability and agility, as per the report. The BCG report argued that the latest wave of technological advancement, such as cloud services, brings potential for the most far-reaching innovation and business growth ever, creating an opportunity for more SMEs to achieve the growth rates of technology leaders by leveraging technology to fuel productivity and growth. The research revealed that high-performing SMEs stayed ahead of mainstream IT adoption, riding new waves of advancement to improve productivity, connect with new customers and markets, particularly outside their own region or country, and compete with much larger players. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com
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Seminar on Innovative Technologies for Floriculture Development at Haripur University on 3 rd Oct,2013
Lecture on Linking Research to Industry at LCWU dated 25th October ,2013
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News in Pictures‌
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