Innovation in mind, startups pave way for

1. Innovation in Mind,
Startups Pave way for
PhDs

2. Contd…
Nita Sachan has an academic background that spans agriculture, pharmacology and
cardiology. But unlike her family members, who are all scientists, she heads
strategy and business development at Mapmygenome, a Hyderabad-based
molecular diagnostics company. A new breed of super-specialised professionals
previously not accommodated by traditional industries are entering the wider job
market, thanks mainly to startups.
Professionals like Sachan, who have PhDs or Masters in fields as diverse as
theoretical physics, spectroscopy and linguistics, are being poached from university
research centres to help startups increase their pace of innovation in areas ike
artificial intelligence.
“India is making an incredibly huge transition from `back-office hub' to `innovation
boiler room',“ said Shridhar Marri, chief executive of Senseforth Technologies,
which in the next two years plans to hire at least 30% of its employees rom pure
science backgrounds to work on natural language process ng. “This transition will
spawn a new breed of cross-fertilized pure science careers.“

3. Contd…
With a majority of India's technology startups trying to decode consumer behaviour,
automate complex processes, analyse mountains of data, or make computers smarter,
professionals with expertise in niche science fields have come to be n demand in
ecommerce and enterprise product companies as well.
“In a field like machine learning, we have hired some of the world's best experts -PhDs
from Stanford and MIT,“ Flipkart's head of corporate development Nishant Verman said in
an earlier conversation with ET. Ravi Vijayaraghavan, VP and head-analytics, and Mohit
Kumar, a data scientist at Flipkart, are among the PhD holders in the firm.
For several core science researchers and academics, startups have emerged as a dynamic
alternative, allowing them to get out of the confines of universities and leapfrog their
careers. “Working for a startup is rewarding because you get to wear multiple hats -from
working on business strategy, development to marketing, communications as well as the
commercial aspects of the scientific research,“ said Sachan, who has a PhD in molecular
biology and biochemistry from the University of Kentucky.

4. Contd…
For Smriti Singh, a research lead at Senseforth, the startup has
presented her with better prospects than academia. The company
helps enterprises by enabling computers make sense of customer
complaints and resolve these quickly.
“I could have eventually become a professor. But I could see myself
getting a smart place in the tech sector,“ said Singh, who studied
computational linguistics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
Hundreds of startups, large and small, are scouting for computational
linguists, she said. Recruitment firms said they are seeing more such
professionals being hired by startups, even if they do not get specific
requests for people with experience in research.

5. Contd…
“The job specialisation is so narrow that it can easily alert a competitor
on the company's new area of research,“ said Aneesh Passi, cofounder
of recruitment firm Basil Advisors. It's not always a cozy deal for
researchers and academics at startups. For one, the salary of a senior
software engineer will likely be higher than that of a PhD degreeholder
with equal experience.
Also, “the patents are owned by the companies they work for, (but)
they get a lot of recognition in the industry,“ said Prasanth Perugupalli,
managing director at IMEC India, a Belgium-based nonprofit that is
trying to digitise pathology slides, which requires bringing together
imaging and analytics capabilities to the biology lab.

6. For details and bookings contact:-
Parveen Kumar Chadha… THINK TANK
(Founder and C.E.O of Saxbee Consultants & Other-Mother
marketingandcommunicationconsultants.com)
Email :-saxbeeconsultants@gmail.com
Mobile No. +91-9818308353
Address:-First Floor G-20(A), Kirti Nagar, New Delhi India Postal Code-110015