Editor's Note: Dr. Qasim Sheikh heads the National Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Research and Development Fund. Operating under the Ministry of Information Technology, the Fund envisions a transformation of Pakistan’s economy “into a knowledge-based economy by promoting efficient, sustainable, and effective ICT initiatives”. Prior to joining National ICT R& D Fund, Dr. Sheikh was a faculty member at FAST-NU Islamabad. STEP Editors Sohaib Khan and Khurram Shafique recently sat down with Dr. Sheikh to talk about the Fund during his visit to Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). Part 1 of this interview was published earlier on STEP.
On Funding Projects from the Industry
STEP: Till now, mostly you were funding projects in the academia. Would you be looking at funding projects that are directly initiated by the industry?
QS: We are supposed to fund projects submitted by the industry. Our proposal can be initiated by even an individual. But, being an entity that funds public money, the longevity of the institution to which we are giving money is very important to us. An individual can take the money (from us), work for a little while, and then disappear. What do we do then? Universities don’t disappear. They can provide longevity and credibility to the project. And, it is not (just) longevity for the length of that project but even after that.
We don’t fund projects just for the sake of those projects. We fund projects to create an eco-system as well. You don’t plant a seed on a land that may be abandoned or may be sold for building a commercial building and the tree will be cut down even before it has a chance to get 5 feet high. So, when industry comes to us, we say, it may be better for you if you come through a university channel.
That’s not a (strict) condition, however. We have also funded industry proposals directly. Actually, we very clearly say that we are a pre-angel fund. We fund creation of technology. But, we are finding out that the challenge of monitoring them can at times become difficult. A lot of these companies start to take this funding as work-for-contract. They say, ‘oh, you asked us to do these things and we’ve done these things, end of story and we’re done’. When you are trying to create an eco-system, and you’re not even asking for any money back, you want the sort of vision where the entity that gets the money runs with the ball. It doesn’t matter whether it was a 100m dash or a marathon; if you have gas, just keep going.
STEP: You talked about longevity and stability but, in a sense, innovation is counter to that. Fostering innovation may mean saying, ‘okay, here’s a smart guy, he has a really smart idea, let me give him some money to go build something’.
QS: We do exactly that. We just say, please park in a university so that there is some stability. You know, smart guys can be very fickle too. [Laughter] If the smart guy walks out, we get totally stuck. If we were VCs, and it was private money, we could say, okay, we were going to lose ninety percent of the projects anyway. This is one of the ninety percent. Ten percent will take us forward. But, with the public funding and government level accountability, we can be taken to task for funding such projects.
Whereas, if the money goes to a university, and a professor is involved, then if nothing else the professor becomes the archive. If the smart guy moves on to the next smart idea, some student or another entrepreneur could come and take the idea and developed IP forward.
STEP: So, what’s the motivation for industry then to get professors up to speed?
QS: One of the ways I motivate industry to partner with the academia is that I give them the argument that suppose you get Rs. 15-20 million from us and suppose the solution that you create is a hit, and suddenly your product is bought by General Electric or Microsoft or some consulting company. Now, the buyer says, we want to take your company to a 300-people development centre. Where are you going to get 300 people from? The idea is that, if an entrepreneur hosts his project in a university and gets a professor and a few students involved, he may not get 300 students by the time the project is completed but at least you would have sown the seed in the university and you will be two years ahead in creating this pipeline. So, a very big positive effect for the industry here is that the human resource developed by universities is in line with industry’s requirements.
STEP: Shouldn’t we make a technology park or an incubator with every university?
QS: That’s exactly what we’re doing. The only difference is that we believe that building a building is not necessary. In several cases, the incubation center of the university is about 3 miles away in a rented house. If the university has space, we compensate the university with rent. If the university does not have space, then the industry-academia joint project rents an office and we pay for electricity, air-conditioning, etc.
STEP: Do you think that the industry that is generating this revenue, which is the telecom industry, has a right to demand back some return for this money? Or, do you think those are two decoupled things?
QS: I think they gain a lot by wealth generation and improvement of standards in the country. If the improvement is more suitable to their goals, it’s even better. So, as any entity we have to pay attention to our financier. Some of the thematic areas for research and development, for example, the center of excellence for telecom operations, are of interest to the telecom industry. There is also a significant probability that education through ICT will light up their network as a lot of that activity may have to happen through mobile phones.
STEP: The Fund’s vision states that you want to create a knowledge-based economy. Historically, economies have evolved from agriculture-based to post industrial-revolution industrial economies, and then recently to knowledge-based economies. In a sense, we are still largely an agricultural economy. Does it make sense to jump directly from an agricultural economy to a knowledge-based economy?
QS: I think there’s significant leap-frogging that’s happening today, for example, our land line connections are 4 million, and our mobile connections are 60, 70, 90 million depending upon what interpretation you go after. Like I talked about before, one of the key things that I really want to push for is to come up with scalable and sustainable solutions for delivering high quality education by using ICT technologies. That you can do without having to go through the industrial age.
Actually, I think a significant amount of technology management models have to be re-thought. I am not an expert on it, but when I hear statements from people who say that they are experts on technology management and technology transfer, and they go through traditional models, I tell them that tradition has been thrown out by telecommunications.
STEP: When you fund research, who owns the intellectual property (IP) that is produced?
QS: We own the IP. The Fund owns the IP. But, the grantee has an irrevocable and perpetual license to commercialize, further develop, sell, and productize the intellectual property. The only thing is that this license is non-exclusive; that is, the grantee cannot stop another party from using the developed technology. If somebody else wants this technology, we have to give it. But, realistically, our goal is to generate wealth in Pakistan. So, if you have taken the technology forward and created a significant company leveraging the developed technology, we are not going to — at least as long as I am the CEO — actively look for people who can use this software and bring you down. After all, we helped create your organization.
Future of the Fund
STEP: Do you think that the Fund is under some sort of risk or pressure to spend? And, if yes, where does the pressure come from?
QS: Oh yeah, we are very much under the pressure that we are not funding enough. This pressure comes from very well-meaning political managers, and I really mean well-meaning. A bureaucrat at a certain level stops looking at the process we are following and starts looking at key parameters from his macro view. And one of those parameters is the amount of funding that we are being able to disburse while satisfying the quality constraints. Similarly, from (the viewpoint of) political management a key parameter is the impact that we are creating.
STEP: So, is there a chance that the Fund might lose some of its funding and the money channeled somewhere else?
QS: Could be. But, I don’t think that’ll be a good thing to do because, if we were allowed to build buildings and buy equipment for a university, we could spend a billion rupees in six months. We could spend four billion rupees in 6 months.
STEP: What about some of the other directions that the Fund is taking? I know the Fund also has a scholarship program.
QS: Yes, we are funding 4-year scholarships for deserving students of rural area public schools. At this point, there are over a 1000 students in the program who are going through FAST, NUST, GIKI, COMSATS, IIU, and other universities. The students who entered the system in 2006 are becoming seniors now, and at least at FAST, since the first batch was only at FAST, they are at the top of the class.
STEP: What are some of the success stories of the Fund?
QS: One of the success stories that I am really proud of is the open-source software engineering course developed by Dr. Fakhur Lodhi at FAST-NU Lahore. In this course, the instructors select an open-source software, and the students become part of its support network. They have to either add a feature or fix a bug that the entire open-source community linked to that software has to accept.
The course has been a real success, so much so that this year a team from FAST got accepted at Google’s Summer of Code program (which is very competitive). Next year, their goal is that every kid who goes through this course to be accepted at Google.
Then there’s a project at FAST-NU Islamabad where they are working with lady health workers and they have developed the whole interface for neo-natal care. That has actually led to a briefcase-sized device which has equipment to measure temperature and blood-pressure, etc. This device has become so popular that a company that does work for UN and USAID throughout Africa and Asia wants to buy it.
Then, there’s HL7, Health Level 7. It is a standard for transferring medical data between applications. Its latest generation, which is probably version 3, is being developed at NUST in open source and already a lab in Pakistan has adopted it where they are using it to transfer data between their centers in Lahore, Islamabad, and Karachi.
STEP: Are you hoping to get the Pakistani diaspora involved with the Fund?
Yes, absolutely. But a problem that I have at times with the diaspora is that they say ‘I make $150,000 a year, so if I give you my time will you give me a percentage of my salary?’
I go as far as saying, look we will get you a solution developed, and you build a Google on top of it and become a billionaire. We would not ask for a single penny back. But, for now, if you spend time in Pakistan, may be, we can compensate your time in Pakistan at a Pakistani level (but not beyond that).
STEP: Well, we hope that there’s enough good will for people to contribute voluntarily, be it as program managers or reviewers or mentors. Of course, they cannot be compensated based on their US salaries. Thank you for your time. We hope that our readers will find this conversation just as interesting as we did.
QS: Thank you, for giving me an opportunity to share my thoughts.
I think one of the key points that, unfortunately, did not get discussed in greater detail in this interview and is largely missed in the broader public discourse around higher education in general, and the role of research in higher education in particular, has to do with the “leap-frogging” that Dr. Sheikh talks about.
In essence, what he’s saying — and what many other implicitly believe — is that information and communication technology sector is unlike other technology industries, in that it can exist without a strong and broad industrial economy at its base. In fact, the argument goes, it can not just exist but prosper and propel economic growth in the broader economy. Put another way, the argument goes that not only can the ICT sector exist without, say, a manufacturing industry, but it can in fact raise the standards of living in the country which in turn lifts the profitability of the ICT (and other) sector(s).
On the surface, this makes sense. So long as you have a computer (or a smart phone or some device with processing capability), electrical power to run it, and a internet connection to communicate with the rest of the world, you are a first-class citizen of the information age, at par with anyone in the industrialized world. And, if you are at par with everyone else, you should be able to do what everyone else is doing with ICT — i.e., innovation and wealth creation.
I accept the argument, but only in its narrowest sense. It seems to me that the information technology sector can be, more or less, a self-sustaining sector in the economy, generating a small number of well-paying jobs and enough revenue to sustain an efficient & profitable ICT sector. At its limits, this sector can also support small ICT-specific R&D which, in-turn, can lead to incremental improvements in the profitability of the sector itself.
This is where I depart from conventional wisdom. I find it very difficult to accept the vision of a sound “knowledge-base economy” built on the backs of this one sector.
First, it is important to distinguish between the fruits of innovation and innovation itself. Existence of 70 million cell phone users is no more a sign of Pakistan’s technological advancement in the information technology, than the arrival of dish antennas in the 90s was of Pakistan’s advancement in space technology. So, we should not let “arrival” of a technology fool us into believing that we have “advanced” to that technology.
Second, the information technology sector in itelf does not provide a large number of well-paying jobs, unlike the manufacturing sector that does provide exactly that. Google, for example, employs around 20,000 people worldwide, whereas Toyota Motors has almost 16 times more employees. Of course, that’s just a comparison between two companies but it illustrates that point that while the IT sector can provide a small number of very ‘high quality’ jobs, it cannot create the kind of mass employment that is required for true economic growth in a large country such as ours.
Third, without a broad industrial economy, the value-addition that R&D in the information technology that can be done is only of incremental value. Major technological break-through require a larger eco-system than one that can be envisioned solely on the backs of the cell phone carriers. An example would be that a vibrant IT industry in Pakistan can produce a few ‘hit’ companies that sell aps for iPhone, but cannot come up with the the next iPhone, let alone the next wireless communication standard.
In conclusion, I would say that the idea that innovation-centric R&D can both be the chicken and the egg of sound economic development in Pakistan needs greater scrutiny. I think the focus that Dr. Sheikh is bringing to the Fund (captured by the discussion on the thematic areas that the Fund is focusing on) is admirable. But, given the scarcity of resources and the challenge of finding & retaining qualified man-power, it is important to have a serious and sustained debate on our overall IT priorities and, more broadly, our higher education priorities in Pakistan. This debate can be informed by the focus that the Fund is showing, but it should also be realistic in its appriciation of the necessary ingredients of a knowledge-based economy.
Finally, I believe disclaimer is in the order. I make no claim to be an expert on the subject, but I am raising these issues only in the hopes that people with better insights will lead a focused debate on how we should align our priorities in the face of a changing world.
One of the projects funded by ICT R&D fund is ROZEE.pk. I couldn’t help but notice that a php website that an average student can design in his spare time got 13 million rupee. This was highly unfair with other previously available businesses such as BrightSpyre.com etc. How this funding was justified? Will ICT R&D fund be supporting every other dot com with right connections?
Also the rate of award of projects had extremely dwindled.
Further may I add that active researchers in the area are rejected as project reviewers. The post of reviewer should be a short term appointment and their name and project they awarded must be made public once their tenure is over, so that the rest of the community can keep a check on them.
I think they are making open source companies, meaning they can milk any lucky successful company later (in Pakistani society call it black mail). How can a company develop a product without owning any intellectual property? The idea of LGPL license in open source is that people build on ideas of others. In case of ICT-fund, they are getting money from hard work of others (Telcos), and then distributing it to other people who will build something from their hard work, and getting all the rights of all intellectual property while sitting on a couch.
For Gods sake, don’t make this fund run by one person, make a board that should’nt include only engineers, but include economists and administration people in it.
Moreover ICT-fund should either remove the condition of owning intellectual-property (because they don’t create any) or mention a percentage of revenues that a future successful company has to be give back to ICT-fund (venture capital model).
My Advice: Dont make engineer or scientist run an ORGANIZATION. I am engineer myself and I know there is no guarantee a PHD or engineer has common sense.