'Linkage between industry and academia imperative'

The prime objective of research is to serve community and in this connection commercialisation of new technologies and inventions developed by scientists will be a prerequisite, said Dr Asif Ali, Director Office of Research, Innovation and Commercialisation (ORIC), University of Agriculture Faisalabad (UAF). He was addressing a meeting of the businessmen and industrialists at Faisalabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FCCI) here on Thursday.
He paid best tribute to the vision of those who had established Agriculture College in 1906 in Faisalabad. They provided a comprehensive network of irrigation and railway and thus laid down a strong foundation for the future commercialisation of the agriculture produce.
Substantiating this point, he said that textile industry in now flourishing in this part as cotton was the main product of this region. He also touched upon the aims and objectives of the universities and said that the main objective is to lay down a strong foundation for economic development. This objective cannot be achieved in isolation and hence a strong link between industry and academia is imperative. He said that the objective of his visit to FCCI is also to convince the business community to play its role in the commercialisation of the technologies developed by UAF. He said that Agriculture College was upgraded into a university in 1961 and its growth is still continuing. "It has seven facilities and 500 PhDs are working round-the-clock on the basic as well as applied sciences", he added.
He said that the latest faculty added in this university is the faculty of food and nutrition and its objective is value addition and commercialisation of the agriculture produce. Professor Dr Asif Ali thanked the USAID for extending financial and technical co-operation in the establishment of centre for advanced studies in food, security and agriculture. He quoted the last visit of Engineer Rizwan Ashraf immediate past president of the FCCI to ORIC and said that he had pinpointed some basic problems confronted by trade and industry and told that ORIC was seriously working on these projects. He further told that UAF has best and high tech testing laboratories fully equipped with latest gadgets which could also be utilised by local industries.
Dr Asif said that UAF has inked 118 MOUs with different national and international institutions including one with FCCI. He asked the local business community to attend a function organised by Distinguished Innovation, Collaboration and Entrepreneurship (DICE) on November 24 and 25. Governor Punjab Rafiq Rajwana and President Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry Mian Muhammad Idrees have been invited to attend it. The main objective of this function is to strengthen industry-academia linkages by exploiting new ideas into business models.